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July 13, 2007 - Planning White Paper

Let battle be joined! Earlier this week, a coalition of some of the UK’s most influential environmental NGOs decided to go to war with Gordon Brown and his government on the new Planning White Paper.

This White Paper is all about accelerating planning decisions on major infrastructure projects – based on the theory (which, it has to be said, is mostly unsubstantiated) that current planning processes get bogged down in wholly unnecessary delay. So there will be a new, independent Commission to decide on key infrastructure issues – such as airports, power stations, waste disposal facilities, ports, roads, etc. And the work of the Commission will be guided by a sequence of new National Policy Statements in all of these different areas.

So here’s the issue: if these National Policy Statements have sustainable development absolutely at their heart; and if the new Commission has sustainable development as its overarching statutory remit; and if government meant what it said about consultation, community empowerment, localism and so on, then the Planning White Paper could be seen as a positive development for delivering more sustainable outcomes through the planning process.

However, the NGOs have come to the conclusion that all those big IFs just won’t be delivered on by government – hence the new coalition firing off a tactical warning barrage putting Gordon Brown “on notice” that this could become the first big test of his own application of the principles and practice of sustainable development.

The Sustainable Development Commission is currently advising government on all this, and we suspect that NGO-angst may be just a little premature. But the Government is not helping itself by letting it be known that the current Air Transport White Paper provides a useful “template” for all future National Policy Statements. Excuse me!! As the Commission made clear at the time, the Air Transport White Paper falls so far short of anything even vaguely resembling a proper sd-proofed process as to leave one gob-smacked at the nerve/bravado/ foolhardiness/insanity of anyone in government proposing that this is what the future holds in terms of embedding sustainable development at the heart of future National Policy Statements.

Posted on July 13, 2007 4:53 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

October 31, 2007 - The Green Belt

Who would have thought that staid old Natural England, one year into its new persona, would have come out with such a fantastic pot-stirring initiative to celebrate its first birthday – by calling for a fundamental review of the Green Belt. In its announcement there is more than a hint that Green Belts have had their day, and that we should come up with a radically different approach. Dovecot duly disturbed, with doves duly wheeling around in consternation, outraged at such unthinkable heresy.

Actually, I’m a bit envious. Somebody had to do it, and I would have quite liked the Sustainable Development Commission to get stuck in on the future of Green Belts – precisely because it is so important, so controversial, and so rich from a sustainable development perspective. Too bad.

But the fear that everyone has (and it’s a wholly legitimate fear) is that the only reason for reviewing the Green Belt at this moment in time is to make life easier for volume house builders who want to make life easier for Gordon Brown who wants to make life easier (theoretically) for all those people who can’t get their first foothold on the housing ladder – by building more than 3 million new homes.

And the Government’s current appetite for all those new homes is so rampant that these fears are more compelling now than ever before. Housing Minister Yvette Cooper is keen to dispel those fears (regardless of Green Belt issues), and powerfully hits the “sustainable and affordable” button on every available occasion – which is great. But there is more than a suspicion that Treasury might hear those same words but continue to treat them as little more than linguistic baubles.

To be fair, Natural England has tried to reflect those fears in the way that it would like the Review of the Green Belt to be carried out. The obvious thing to do (to ensure the kind of quality debate we need) is first to review the need for a review – in other words, just how broke is the current system before anyone sets out to fix it. How well has it achieved its objectives? How good a job is it doing in terms of nature conservation, recreation, amenity value, and simply preventing development. Without so much as a mention of new houses, this would really begin to highlight the nature of the debate that is needed.

But good for Natural England. A pot well stirred!

Posted on October 31, 2007 3:59 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 7, 2008 - Procurement in the public sector

I know that everybody finds procurement really tedious. Even serious SD enthusiasts can’t seem to stop their eyes glazing over just as soon as the “p” word makes an appearance in any conversation. But from the Sustainable Development Commission’s perspective, how we spend roughly £160 billion of tax payer’s money is absolutely fundamental – so stop reading now if your eyes are starting to glaze over!

I have just come hot-foot from Defra’s second Suppliers Conference, where I found myself entertainingly sandwiched between Helen Ghosh (Permanent Secretary of Defra) and Ian Andrews (Second Permanent Under Secretary at the MOD), in the company of a whole host of pretty serious private sector buyers to government. It so happens that these two departments are the two departments that are doing best on sustainable procurement, and both have a very good story to tell in terms of their own engagement with suppliers on sustainable procurement – which the SDC will be featuring in its imminent (and very eagerly anticipated!) Sustainable Development in Government (SDiG) report.

That can’t be said about all government departments, let alone all of Local Authorities or health bodies of government agencies. Two years ago, the UK Government committed itself to being a “leader on sustainable procurement in the EU” by 2009 – and, quite honestly, it’s going to be one hell of a stretch to get anywhere close to that leadership goal.

Indeed, getting most departments to start getting serious about sustainable procurement – to start implementing the governments own perfectly adequate Sustainable Procurement Action Plan – has been a bit of a nightmare. Data gathering in management systems have often been defective; there has been no proper leadership provided by most Permanent Secretaries; hard-pressed Procurement Officers are just left to get on with it, struggling against the grain of crude “lowest cost mindsets”.

Things that are already mandated by central government are not implemented (the Office of Government Commerce’s Quick Wins, for example), and Treasury have been utterly supine in enforcing the use of critical tools such as “Whole-Life Costing” for all major capital expenditure projects.

But the good news – the really good news – is that this is about to change. Gus O’Donnell (Cabinet Secretary), Ian Andrews and Nigel Smith (new Chief Executive at OGC) have spent the good part of the last couple of months interrogating the causes of this chronic underperformance, acknowledging that it’s no longer acceptable, and putting in place a host of changes across government that we believe will transform this whole area. At last!

Posted on March 7, 2008 4:29 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 20, 2008 - Holding government to account

You probably won’t believe it, but our collective hearts sink every time the Sustainable Development Commission has to publish its annual report on the Government’s progress against its own sustainability targets – quite simply because the significance of the Government’s own performance in this area is enormous. Enormous in terms of impact on the private sector, on local authorities, and indeed on private citizens, and if the Government’s performance is rubbish, then the knock-on effects are really bad for sustainable development in general.

And for the last five years, the Government’s performance has been rubbish. Last year, commenting on the 05/06 results, David Miliband (then the Defra Secretary of State) performed the best collective mea culpa on behalf of government as a whole that we’d ever seen. It sounded really impressive – “never again, got to put our hands up on this one” – and so on. Unfortunately, despite the eloquence, nothing changed from that point on.

So this year’s report isn’t much better – as you’ll see if you check out the SDC’s website. Some really good stuff (28% of electricity from renewables, easily meeting the target of !0% by 2008, some rubbish stuff (two-thirds of Departments not on track to reduce emissions of CO2 by 12.5% by 2010), and a lot of what I would describe as just marking time. I find all this so depressing that I now hate having to comment on it. In fact, this year, I opted out of all media work around our report.

But next year (my last as Chairman of the SDC, as I step down in July 2009) is going to be different. Happily, the powers that be in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office have suddenly woken up to the fact that this kind of systematic hypocrisy (lecturing everybody else but barely lifting a finger oneself) just doesn’t make any sense – and is quite seriously damaging for one’s reputation.

The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, has now charged all Permanent Secretaries with “getting it sorted”, and they have been told that performance on both sustainable operations and procurement will be included in their objectives (a recommendation that the SDC first made four years ago). At the same time, the Office of Government Commerce has moved with uncharacteristically speed and purpose to improve the quality of data management, agreed proper Delivery Plans, set up a centre of excellence for sustainable procurement, and bring some serious leadership to bear on this hitherto neglected area of government performance.

Hallelujah!

Posted on March 20, 2008 12:08 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 25, 2008 - Foreign Office Strategic Framework

For a very clever man, David Miliband does do some very stupid things.

Under his customary ‘forceful leadership’, the Foreign Office has just adopted a new Strategic Framework, replacing the 10 Strategic Objectives that preceded it. In the process, not only has sustainable development been eliminated from the Framework, but the Foreign Office’s SD team has been disbanded, resources axed, SD attachés in embassies around the world have been told to focus exclusively on climate change, and the visible presence of SD in the FCO has quite simply been eliminated.

Mr Miliband’s officials offer two rationalisations for this retrograde absurdity: first, that sustainable development is now “mainstreamed” across the whole of the FCO, and does not therefore need a ring-fenced resource. I’ve heard that lame excuse so many times, and I can assure you that it holds no more water for the FCO than it does anywhere else. Without a specific Departmental Strategic Objective, let alone a cross-departmental PSA, SD in the FCO has effectively been relegated to the ‘lip-service only’ league.

Secondly, they point to the fact that the new Framework does indeed include a high-level commitment to “promoting a low-carbon, high-growth global economy” – and that this covers off sustainable development.

Complete rubbish. Climate change is just one (albeit the most problematic) symptom of a fundamentally flawed model of economic progress – a consequence, incidentally, of the brainless advocacy of the kind of high growth that takes no account of the social and environmental externalities it causes. Does the Foreign Secretary honestly not understand that the world would still be falling to pieces even if climate change wasn’t now exacerbating every one of the existing crises? And what now happens to the excellent work the FCO once used to do on biodiversity, on sustainable forestry, on sustainable tourism, on the Millennium Development Goals – and so on.

It’s just so stupid. But unfortunately, Mr Miliband has a track record here. When he whirled to Defra as new Secretary of State a couple of years ago, he instantly got rid of sustainable development as the Department’s overarching mission, opting instead for the populist, but ultimately unusable notion of ‘One Planet Living’. (Which Defra instantly got rid of, by the way, as soon as Mr Miliband moved on.) This was not helpful, and as a direct consequence, Defra no longer has a PSA to “promote sustainable development across the whole of Government”, and bits of the ‘institutional architecture’ that Defra had laboriously built up (like the Sustainable Development Ministers) have just disappeared.

So it’s clear that there’s a bigger problem here. First Defra, then the FCO. Perish the thought, but my view of it is that Mr Miliband just doesn’t understand sustainable development, having dedicated only a fraction of that awesome cerebral capacity to really interrogating what it’s all about.

This is a particularly disturbing blind spot given that not one of the ‘big ideas’ that the Labour Party has wheeled in and promptly wheeled out again over the years has ever come close to sustainable development in terms of potential scale, relevance, impact and intellectual coherence.

But I’m much looking forward to the FCO’s next Sustainable Development Action Plan. At least it will be short.

Posted by JP on March 25, 2008 2:00 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

April 15, 2008 - Review of Sub National Economic Development and Regeneration… Part II

There is a remote possibility that I am just a touch obsessed with this particular bit of Government process, in which case apologies to those who are not touched by any such obsession. But I feel I have duty to update.

Previous SNR instalments have portrayed this innocuous-sounding review of economic growth and development at the regional level as a bit of a horror story – along the following lines:

"This Treasury-inspired confection popped out in July last year, after minimal consultation with either Defra or CLG, heralding the most radical changes in the English regions since the Regional Development Agencies were brought into being in 1999.

There was no serious reference to sustainable development, and no reference to the imperative of securing a low-carbon economy. It had one principal purpose: to get the English Regions and local authorities to focus on accelerated economic growth, including increased housing numbers. Out go those sad old Regional Assemblies, now deemed unfit for that particular purpose, with their regional planning functions to be dumped on the RDAs, even though they themselves are demonstrably unfit for such a role, lacking as they do any kind of democratic accountability. To describe the Sub National Review (or SNR) as a dog’s dinner is an insult to the culinary expectations of any self-respecting canine. "

I can’t attribute developments since then solely to the Sustainable Development Commission’s ire on the SNR, but a consultation document that was due out before Christmas 2007 somehow got delayed until April 2nd (under the friendlier title ‘Prosperous Places’) largely as a consequence of some pretty serious inter-departmental argy-bargy. So congratulations are due to all those who have been working so hard over the last few weeks to civilise this wretched document – a pretty good job done.

There will now be the usual 12 weeks for people to feed back their reactions and ideas, which might just conceivably lead to a little bit more civilising along the way.

The Sustainable Development Commission will obviously be producing its own response – just as soon as possible, to help inform others keen to get stuck in here. Fortunately, we’ll have plenty of good things to say (the whole tone of ‘Prosperous Places’, is completely different from the original, with none of the arrogance and macho-growthism), and many of the proposals about a new integrated regional strategy are very sound. But none of the serious governance issues have as yet been properly addressed. Regional Development Agencies will still take over the regional planning functions, once the Regional Assemblies have been put down, even though their Boards will remain ‘business-led’.

And then there’s all the rest of the original SNR that isn’t being consulted on at the moment. How much of that is the Government just going to try and sneak through? What happens, for instance, to the aggressive commitments the original makes to sweep away all other high-level targets for the RDAs apart from a “single over-arching growth objective”, including delivering on housing numbers?

Maybe that too has been consigned to some deep Treasury dustbin – to be replaced (miracle of miracles!) by a commitment to the following definition of “sustainable economic growth” to be found in a footnote in ‘Prosperous Places’:

“Sustainable economic growth is economic growth that can be sustained and is within environmental limits but also enhancing the environment and social welfare, and avoids greater extremes in future economic cycles.”

Clearly not the work of a lover of the subtleties of the English language, but just great to be getting along with!

Posted by JP on April 15, 2008 3:52 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

April 21, 2009 - Government and the low carbon economy

The response to Peter Mandelson’s rather obvious point that Government is going to have to take a more hands-on role in shaping a low-carbon industrial strategy has been extraordinary.

As if this marked some ideological reversion to old Labour at its command-and-control worst back in the 1970s!

Work it out, guys. In the shortest possible period of time, we’ve got to move from an economy almost totally dependent on fossil fuels to one in which fossil fuels will be bit-part players in the energy mix. A 34% reduction in CO2 by 2020 (which the Government will announce as its interim target tomorrow) is just a taste of things to come.

Which makes the debate about market-led or regulation-led interventions all but irrelevant. Markets only work when governments shape those markets to ensure the desired objectives – in this case, an ultra low-carbon economy. “Getting a realistic price on every tonne of CO2 “, to use Nick Stern’s phraseology, is of course a market mechanism – but getting us to that realistic price as fast as possible will be driven by governments not by markets left to their own devices.

On which point, cracking good piece by Nick Stern in the Times today, laying down the law for Alistair Darling in terms of tomorrow's budget. Any new coal-fired power stations to have “carbon capture and storage” mandated by government as a condition of planning; government to re-think the third runway at Heathrow if the Committee on Climate Change indicates it can’t be done within the new carbon budgets; clear government leadership on efficiency and renewables, and a clear commitment to use public expenditure to help drive the new low-carbon industrial strategy. A lot of public expenditure: up to 1.5% of GDP.

Part of which seemed to be what Peter Mandelson was saying about the need for a new kind of “low-carbon industrial activism”. However, I’m not sure he’s quite got Nick Stern’s equally powerful message about avoiding “lock-in” in terms of big, clunky, carbon-intensive infrastructure and investments.

But perhaps we’ll hear more about all that tomorrow.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 21, 2009 2:44 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

April 22, 2009 - Transport and the budget

I skimmed the newspapers this morning to pick up on any unexpected ‘green vibes’ around the Budget. Every indication is that there isn’t going to be any big “New Deal” brought forward, as part of a larger recovery package, although lots of ‘green lollypops’ will no doubt be there in the shop window.

And almost certainly a number of them will cover transport. A £5,000 subsidy for purchasers of electric cars has been widely flagged plus a few tens of millions to subsidise charging points. Hopefully, we’ll also see some details around the Government’s earlier commitment to promote electric vehicles through the Low Carbon Vehicles Procurement programme.

On the whole, this would be a good thing. The Committee on Climate Change has been very clear in its advice to government that the wholesale electrification of transport (apart from aviation!) is a precondition of meeting our long term targets on CO2 and other greenhouse gases. A lot depends on where that electricity will come from, but its good to see at least one little government toe in the water.

And then there’s the whole debate about a possible scrappage scheme – with motorists getting up to £2000 to hand in their old cars and buy new ones. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has been lobbying ferociously to get this through, simply as a support mechanism for hard-pressed car companies. (Car sales in March were down 30% on last year). They argue it has worked in January in terms of new car sales, so why shouldn’t it work here?

It might. But there will be zero sustainability benefits arising from such a scheme even if it does. Even if people buy slightly ‘greener’ models, there will still be very high emissions arising because of all the CO2 embedded in the manufacture of those cars. So the cost per tonne per CO2 saved is very high.

Environmentalists have argued that a much better use of taxpayer’s money would be for the Government to support the establishment of low-carbon car clubs – reducing congestion, reducing emissions, and reducing costs for those motorists smart enough to realise they can get almost all the benefits they want from the use of a car, without the hassle of actually owning one.

All of this will be a big test of Darling’s “seriousness of intent”, helping move transport policy just a little bit further down the road to its inevitable low-carbon destination.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 22, 2009 1:44 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

April 23, 2009 - The budget - green vs sustainable

There’s a world of difference between a “Green Budget” and a “Budget for Sustainability”.

On the “green front”, it could have been a lot worse, but it could have been better too. (See yesterday’s press release from the Sustainable Development Commission below). Not exactly the mega-recovery package that has been called for but not insignificant either: £525 million for offshore wind; £435 million for additional energy efficiency measures; £405 million for green technologies; encouragement for CHP; and new support for carbon capture and storage – with more details on this coming from Ed Miliband today. And all of that backed up by the new Carbon Budget – with a target of a 34% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020.

The papers today have good coverage of this. On the broader sustainability front, however, there’s been much less coverage. But both the new 50p rate of income tax and the projected levels of debt have highly significant sustainability implications.

Fairer taxes (I would argue) are a critical part of any sustainable economy. All the evidence shows that more equitable societies (i.e. with lower levels of income disparities) are more contented societies. The data on this has been compellingly brought together in a new book called “The Spirit Level”, which makes the case that almost all the worst socio-economic problems in society today can be traced back to chronic poverty. So, being very obvious about it, better-off people should pay higher taxes – and that’s as much a part of a sustainable society as very low carbon.

On the debt front, the bottom line couldn’t be clearer. We have indeed been living way beyond our means; levels of public debts are going to have to rise dramatically to bail us out of that mess; it will take many, many years before our public finances are back in balance – and the pain of that will be spread over the next generation of tax payers as well as this one.

Not good from the perspective of intergenerational justice that lies at the heart of the concept of sustainable development.


Sustainable Development Commission PRESS RELEASE:

BUDGET FOCUS ON LOW CARBON TECHNOLOGY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY TO BE WELCOMED – BUT MUST BE PART OF LONG-TERM STRATEGY

The Sustainable Development Commission welcomed the Budget announcement of £495million of additional funding for low carbon technologies and energy efficiency over the next two years, and called for this to be part of a committed, long-term strategy to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
But the Commission questioned the announcement of a £2,000 discount on new cars for motorists scrapping cars over 10 years old, arguing that under such a scheme, the cost per tonne of CO2 saved is very high. It also criticised the fact that no emissions requirements are attached to new vehicles.
Jonathon Porritt, Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, said:
“The transition to a low-carbon economy is the most urgent challenge facing the government – both economically and environmentally; and achieving this calls for a long-term commitment. While we welcome the investment announced in today’s Budget, this spending ceases two years from now, and its scale not going to put us on track to achieving the extremely ambitious targets of the Climate Change Act and its associated carbon budgets.”
The scale of green spending announced today falls far short of the £30bn a year for the next three years called for by the Sustainable Development Commission in its recent Sustainable New Deal. The report argued that only a commitment on this scale can ensure a globally-competitive, low carbon future for the UK. It argued that more than 50% of such a package would generate significant financial returns within two to three years, and could create at least 800,000 jobs.
Jonathon Porritt said:
“An investment strategy of the kind we have called for would create appropriate incentives for both the private and public sector, and would demonstrate the kind of unequivocal leadership that UK citizens are now ready for.”

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on April 23, 2009 12:37 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

July 27, 2009 - Looking back on nine years at the SDC

My final blog as chair of the Sustainable Development Commission – this being my final day!

It has been an extraordinary nine years. Back in June 2000, when Michael Meacher persuaded John Prescott to persuade Tony Blair that I would (despite all the obvious downsides!) be a suitable candidate for the SDC’s first Chair, we didn’t really have much to go on. There were various initiatives that had arisen out of the 1992 Earth Summit (a round table, a high-level advisory group reporting to the prime minister, a decent but largely ignored strategy and so on), but zero understanding across government that sustainable development was anything other than environmentalism by another name. Our budget was small (around £350K), our welcome was muted, expectations were low (‘just another government-sponsored talkshop’) – but our ambitions were large!

It’s all a bit different now. We have got a real job, reasonable resources, a good ‘inside track’ with much of Whitehall and with the governments of Scotland and Wales, a genuinely independent persona, the inevitable mish-mash of respect, irritation, disregard and enthusiasm for what we do, both within and beyond government, and a reasonable portfolio of serious interventions, publications, watchdog reports, policy breakthroughs and constructive engagement with departments that has helped make a real difference.

Though it may not always see this as a blessing, the UK government has earned a lot of credit internationally for setting up a body like the SDC, as well for formulating what is still a cracking good SD strategy (Securing the Future) in 2005. The ‘mainstreaming’ imperative that drives all our work (“to make sustainable development the central organising principle of everything Government does”) may not as yet have got as far as we would have liked, but it has got a lot further than many may once have thought possible.

Getting the balance right between our advisory and capacity-building work on the one hand, and our watchdog work on the other, remains something of an art form – and it has to be said there have been several ministers (and even more senior civil servants!) who have been pretty angst-ridden about that balancing act over the years.

But though it’s bound to be frustrating for any government to have a body like the SDC commenting on weaknesses as well as strengths (the media, of course, are only ever interested in the former!), I suspect the conclusion amongst most of them is broadly supportive. At least, I very much hope it is!

So full marks to the government (and to DEFRA in particular) for some serious process innovation here, and to that cohort of SD champions inside the system working away indefatigably to improve the performance of their organisations, often invisibly and usually unloved. They have been amazing.

But the real strength of the Commission lies in that combination of experienced, passionate and totally committed Commissioners, working closely with an extraordinarily professional and equally committed Secretariat. It has been an unbelievable privilege to be part of that – and, in true SD style, to leave things at least a little bit better on quitting the post than they were on arriving!

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 27, 2009 2:09 PM | | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

October 1, 2009 - £10 million will fund best low-carbon community initiatives

No sign yet (thankfully!) that the Government’s Low Carbon Investment Fund is at risk of ‘savage cuts’.

On Monday, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) launched its new Low Carbon Communities Challenge, which consists basically of a £10 million pot that communities can apply to for funding for their own low-carbon initiatives – which might be a housing retrofit scheme, a biomass plant, or even electric vehicle charging points.

Up to 20 communities will be selected as the lucky winners.

It’s a good scheme, underpinned by a ‘specialist support squad’ made up of partners with expertise from inside and outside government – including The Energy Savings Trust, The Carbon Trust, WRAP, and the Third Sector.

So let’s hope DECC is overwhelmed by applications!

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on October 1, 2009 3:41 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

October 22, 2009 - US position on Copenhagen may be treaty-wrecking

You can’t fault our Government for its ongoing efforts to get people to focus on the Copenhagen Conference. Both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband are out there emphasising the ‘make or break’ nature of the event: governments either seal the deal now, or we could be into drift for a couple of years.

Personally I’m not so sure about this kind of rhetoric. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world if it took another six or nine months to get the right deal sealed – and that means a deal with the US on board. And that probably won’t happen until some kind of climate bill has got through the US Senate.

That, at least, was the prevailing view at the end of the most recent round of talks in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago. The Senate is bogged down in health insurance stuff; Obama doesn’t want to use his political capital to try and force it through the Senate prior to Copenhagen; and he absolutely doesn’t want a re-run of the Kyoto process, where Al Gore signed off on the Kyoto Protocol only to find that the Senate would have nothing to do with it later on.

And that’s the reason Obama hasn’t accepted the invitation to go to Copenhagen himself in order to bring his own personal leadership to bear on the negotiations.

Because the focus of a lot of this discussion is about Obama and most people just seem to have bought into this approach. That’s just the way it is: unfortunate timing and all that. America doing its best in difficult domestic circumstances.

I must say, I don’t quite see it like that. I think this represents a massive failure on Obama’s part. As the rest of the world raises its game (particularly in key countries like China, India and Brazil), the United States’ negotiating position, in essence, doesn’t seem to have advanced much beyond George Bush’s negotiating position.

US negotiators still refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility. They’re still trying to force developing countries to do what America itself has totally failed to do up until now – and doesn’t show much readiness to do it even now. They’re still trying to change the baseline date from 1990 to 2005 – and, in essence, want to tear up Kyoto rather than build on it by allowing each country to determine its own path to greenhouse gas reductions.

For US negotiators, read Obama. I don’t know why everyone (and particularly Government ministers) is being so ‘understanding’ about this. It’s a despicable, immoral, self-serving, treaty-wrecking negotiating position which, in the current context, where the need for action is so much greater, and so many other countries are now playing ball, is no better than what George Bush was doing during his eight poisonous years in the White House.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on October 22, 2009 4:12 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

October 30, 2009 - Leaders will be shocked into climate action

Even today’s climate optimists acknowledge that there are going to have to be some traumatic ‘shocks to the system’, induced by accelerated climate change, to jolt politicians the world over to move up a gear (well, several gears).

These shocks will come, and from the perspective of our long-term prospects, they need to come as rapidly as possible. And to be as traumatic as possible – otherwise, politicians and their electorates will rapidly revert to the current mix of non-specific anxiety and inertia.

Post-Katrina, for instance, public opinion in the US provided the best example of this phenomenon. It took just two years for Fox News and other right-wing shock-jocks to straighten out deviant US citizens who’d started to think that it really might be time for the US to get stuck in on climate change.

But Australia provides an even more compelling story. Over the last few years, it’s had more than its fair share of traumatic shocks. Earlier this year, Melbourne broke its record February temperature by a full 3°C to hit 46.8°C. This was also the day of Australia’s worst ever bush fires, with 173 people killed and 2000 homes destroyed. The Murray-Darling Basin (Australia’s food bowl, with nearly 40% of Australia’s agricultural production based around its waters) has been in so-called ‘drought’ since 2002. Flow levels are now down to 5% of their long-term average. As a result, it’s now assumed that the globally significant wetlands and lake system at the river’s mouth will face ecological collapse over the next few years.

And now there’s a new report out in Australia, featured in the Guardian on Wednesday, (‘Managing Our Coastal Zones in a Changing Climate’) which reveals that more than £80 billion of property is at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent storms – and that’s going to send a bit of a shock wave down the backbones of the 80% of Australian citizens who live along the coastline! The report’s principle policy proposal is that there should be a ban on any further development at beach level.

So what’s been the net impact of all these shocks on Australian politics? The victory of Kevin Rudd over John Howard in the most recent general election in Australia was attributed in part to his relatively progressive stance on climate change. But since then, there’s been one set back after another in terms of introducing appropriate policy interventions, with Australia’s mining and coal industries in full-on defensive mode, and its equivalent of the CBI acting exactly like our CBI did under the Neanderthal leadership of Digby Jones a few years ago.

The outcome of which is that Australia is still doing very little on climate change, and has no chance whatsoever of meeting its Kyoto targets. It still pursues its dreams of unbridled affluence, California-style, and is about as far from adopting a leadership role as it is possible to get.

Clearly the shocks to their systems just haven’t been bad enough – which gives us some sense of just how bad future climate shocks are going to have to be to drive any serious transformation.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on October 30, 2009 4:02 PM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

November 10, 2009 - The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government

When I was still Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, I was hoping to produce a snapshot of just how deep sustainable development had penetrated into the workings of government – since the election of the Labour Government in 1997, the establishment of the Sustainable Development Commission in 2000, and the issuing of the Sustainable Development Strategy, ‘Securing the Future’. As it happens, it didn’t get done. Which has allowed me a few extra months to reflect in less frenetic circumstances.

And that’s been helpful! I have to admit, I was feeling a bit grumpy back in July. There’s only so much head banging one can do before brain damage sets in! And so much of what the Sustainable Development Commission does is going on behind the scenes – received and acted on, for example, by bodies like the Environmental Audit Committee, the Office of Government Commerce, individual departments and so on.

And if one gets really disciplined about both sides of the balance sheet (the pluses and the minuses), the overall picture on the standing of sustainable development question is actually “not half bad” – and I’m constantly struck by just how impressed people from other countries are at the ‘sustainable development architecture’ that’s been created here in the UK, including the Sustainable Development Commission itself.

But there still remains something of a mystery here, despite all the good things, it’s demonstrably clear to me that not enough has changed on the ground. Plenty of good process but not enough good outcomes (and quite a few really bad outcomes!)

That’s the mystery I’ve tried to unravel in this new Report, unimaginatively entitled The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government. Not an all-signing, all-dancing retrospective, and certainly not a completely dispassionate study. But useful for all that, I hope.

View full report

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on November 10, 2009 3:32 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

December 10, 2009 - Booze and bracket-bashing – inside the real Copenhagen ‘junket’

As you read the daily reports from Copenhagen, spare a thought for the hundreds of environmental and development activists out there, keeping the cause of ‘climate justice’ under the noses of government delegations, UN Officials and the media.

It always amuses me when I hear sarcastic journalists refer to these conferences as ‘junkets’ or ‘jamborees’.

In reality they are more like a descent into hell, with delegates surrounded on the one hand by the demons of utter mind-numbing tedium, and on the other by the gremlins of mischievous government delegations intent on emasculating any final agreement.

The formal process is focussed on the draft text, which summarises that agreement with much of its text still in brackets. These brackets can only be removed via unanimous agreement between all government delegations.

It’s often the same ones (from Saudi Arabia onwards!) that stick to their oil-drenched arguments, yielding as little as they can possibly get away with short of total opprobrium descending upon them as other delegations get angrier and angrier.

That goes on for days, until the elected politicians bowl up next week, and it starts all over again.

The only escape for knackered greenies is alcohol, liver-numbing quantities of which are consumed every evening.

That’s what life is like for the poor sods that have to do the work in the formal conference. Far more stimulation is available for those attending the informal, largely NGO conference (the Klimaforum in Copenhagen), buzzing away on the margins of the government negotiations.

Every now and again positive messages flow out of the NGO forum to cause a bit of a stir inside the conference, but nothing like as often or as powerfully as the negative energy flowing in the other direction.

Which is exactly what happened on Tuesday, when a document leaked to the Guardian revealed a ‘secret text’ put together by a group of rich countries (including the UK and the US), which pretty much undermines every single aspect of the tortuous negotiations that have been going on over the last two years.

Inside the conference venue the bracket-bashing goes on uninterrupted. But when something like that happens, everything else goes pear-shaped. Anger, incredulity, rage, despair and dark, demonic humour take over until the alcohol kicks in.

Some junket!

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on December 10, 2009 12:39 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

March 31, 2010 - Education, Education, Education

Here’s a bit of vintage Blair for you:

“Sustainable development will not just be a subject in the classroom: it will be in its bricks and mortar and the way the school uses and even generates its own power. Our students won’t just be told about sustainable development, they will see and work within a school that is a living, learning place in which to explore what a sustainable lifestyle means”.

Having delivered himself of these eloquent words, Tony Blair sat back and got on with other things, presumably on the assumption that the Department for Children, Schools and Families would get together with Treasury and just ‘make it happen’. DCSF delivered on its side of the deal in terms of its ‘Sustainable Schools’ initiative, which is one of the best things the Labour Government has done. But from the point of view of our educational estate, Treasury and DCSF then spent the next decade scrapping over what could or couldn’t be done, from a sustainability perspective, through Building Schools for the Future, PFI and other capital programmes.

Net outcome ten years on: pretty poor. Some brilliant (even ‘iconic’) examples of best practice on both new build and refurbishments; a somewhat larger number of projects that might be described as ‘good, but nothing special’, and a much, much larger number of projects that fall so far short of what could have been done as to make Tony Blair’s words ring very hollow indeed.

It’s hard to exaggerate the scale of this missed opportunity – from an educational as well as a sustainability point of view. Here’s a very different kind of quote from an Ofsted Report last year:

“In the sample schools, ‘hands-on activities’ in a range of locations contributed to improvements in standards, achievement, motivation, personal development and behaviour”.

What’s being referred to here is what is known as ‘Learning Outside the Classroom’. Not just in terms of school visits and field trips, but in terms of the use of School Grounds designed specifically to promote good learning and excellent social interaction. In other words, proof positive of the kind of educational outcome that can be achieved by designing schools to the highest sustainability standards.

During the election period, I’d like to see those words embossed in gold and hung over the desk of the Secretary of State at DCSF – in preparation for the next holder of that Office. They would remind him/her that schools that are well-designed, zero-carbon, super-efficient, bio-diverse and just great places to be, make a massive contribution to learning, motivation and even behaviour.

What kind of money value should we put on that as taxpayers? I only ask because Treasury puts a zero value on it. It really couldn’t care less about the huge societal benefits that flow from that kind of educational uplift.

Indeed, Treasury is so utterly dysfunctional that it still hasn’t settled on a standard way of accounting for the reduced operating costs of super-efficient, very low-carbon schools over the life-time of any new or even refurbished school.

Time after time, as a direct result of this failure, the blindingly obvious case for spending more up front on capital costs (anywhere between 10% and 15%, depending on particular circumstances) is ignored – or eroded away as the inevitable cost-cutting kicks in during the design and construction phase for both new build and refurbishments.

The sums involved here (in terms of capital programmes for the educational estate) are staggering: at least £45 billion over a ten-year period. Knowing what we now know about future energy costs and the likely cost of carbon, it’s criminally irresponsible not to be spending every one of those pounds as sustainably as possible in order to protect the interests of future taxpayers.

A worthy case, perhaps, for the Taxpayers’ Alliance – if they weren’t so ideologically predisposed against anything progressive, let alone sustainable.

One of the organisations that has been tracking this story close-up has been Learning Through Landscapes (LTL). LTL was set up 20 years ago, to get Head Teachers, the Department, Local Education Authorities and Ofsted to focus in on the importance of school grounds, both from a recreational and an educational point of view. During that time it’s advised and supported hundreds of schools, lobbied a stream of Ministers, and helped make life better, on the ground, for countless kids passing through those improved premises.

It’s achieved a huge amount – as became very clear at its 20th Anniversary Conference in London last week. But it could have achieved so much more if it hadn’t come up against the Treasury’s reality-defying short-termism.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on March 31, 2010 11:36 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

July 23, 2010 - The Government's First Green Betrayal

As the former Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000-2009, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the Government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the Commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision. They’ve put forward four justifications:

1. It will save money
The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which come from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.

2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government.
Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the Government ‘gets it’.

Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.

There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the Commission, no doubt because both Countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.

3. It will avoid duplication
This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises Ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective. It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that. And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.

4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body
It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:

“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”

Even after nine years working with dozens of Government Ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the Department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.

If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of it’s own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?

So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.

And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the Government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.

I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.

It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the Green agenda will fare under the Coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.


Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 23, 2010 11:20 AM | | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

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