Sam Lakha, Manager, Volans Outreach.
Democracy as Killer App No. 3
In this context, a reflection by Niall Ferguson in today’s Financial Times on the meaning of the past decade struck me as particularly apt and insightful. He explores the reasons behind the astonishing - and accelerating - shift to the east in the world’s economic (and, ultimately, political) centre of gravity. In the process, he asks what it was that gave the West its “ascendancy”, through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the ensuing race around the world, as far as the Antipodes?
His answer is that the West benefited from six “killer apps”. These were: “the capitalist enterprise, the scientific method, a legal and political system based on private property rights and individual freedom, traditional imperialism, the consumer society and what Weber probably misnamed the ‘Protestant’ ethic of work and capital accumulation as ends in themselves.”
Some of these, Ferguson argues, particularly numbers one and two, China has already replicated. Other, and among these he includes imperialism, consumption and the work ethic, it is making headway on. “Only number three,” he notes, “the Western way of law and politics - shows little sign of emerging in the one-party state that is the People’s Republic.” But, he muses, “does China need dear old democracy to achieve enduring prosperity?”
Those two words, enduring and prosperity, put the question slap-bang into the heartland of the territory the FDSD team is beginning to map out. As we wrestle with the question of how to shift paradigms in ways that we want, we also have to be aware that paradigms often shift under their own steam. As we reflect on future pathways to scale for solutions we find exciting, the ways in which those solutions will play out will be powerfully influenced by paradigmatic and civilisational trends of the sort discussed here.
Read Niall Ferguson’s fascinating article and ponder our collective future trajectories - as I did. Then join us at the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development, in 2010 and beyond, in the quest to find out how to marry the best of West and East in pursuit of sustainability. For updates, keep an eye out here.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/democracy-as-killer-app-no-3/.
- John ElkingtonDo You Want Ice With That?
Water is an increasingly political issue worldwide - and it comes in many forms. “From the Arctic sea ice to the Antarctic interior and the mountainous peaks of Peru, Alaska, and Tibet, ice is melting at an alarming rate. The accelerating loss of ice sheets, sea ice, and glaciers is one of the most powerful and striking indicators of a warming climate.” So says Alexandra Giese of the Earth Policy Institute in a new briefing.
Here’s more of the briefing:
“The most notable ice loss in recent years has been the shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. From the beginning of the satellite record in 1979 through 1996, ice area decreased at a steady rate of 3 percent per decade in response to rising temperature. In the following decade, ice area decreased by 11 percent, reaching a dramatic minimum in 2007. In September of that year, sea ice occupied only 3.6 million square kilometers, an area 27 percent smaller than the previous record low (in 2005) and 38 percent smaller than the 1979–2007 average. Summer sea ice coverage has increased slightly in the last two years, but it is still far below the long-term average.
“Declines in ice thickness and volume are just as dramatic. The combination of these trends has led to a decrease in the amount of ice that persists in the Arctic through multiple seasons. Multiyear ice is more stable and less susceptible to break-up than the thin, short-lived seasonal ice that forms each winter. Between 1987 and 2007, the amount of ice at least five years old has plummeted from 57 to just 7 percent. Drastic changes in sea ice cover have led scientists from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict that the summer of 2037 could see the first ice-free Arctic in a million years. Other scientists have predicted a largely ice-free summertime Arctic as early as 2015.
“Declining sea ice is a self-reinforcing trend because of what is known as the albedo effect. Ice reflects up to 70 percent of the sunlight that reaches it, while ocean water reflects only 6 percent and absorbs the rest as heat. This means that as soon as a small amount of sea ice disappears and exposes the underlying ocean water, the system starts absorbing more energy, which leads to further ice melt. Dangers associated with this runaway warming scenario include rapid destruction of diverse ecosystems that support polar bears, seals, and walruses, among other organisms; a thawing of the Arctic tundra, which can release copious amounts of the greenhouse gas methane; and increased warming of nearby Greenland.
“Satellite data indicate that the Greenland ice sheet has been experiencing accelerated melt, particularly over the past several decades. In fact, Greenland’s average annual melt between 2002 and 2005 was triple that of the 1997-2003 period, and the summer melt area on the ice sheet has increased 30 percent since 1979. In recent years, changes in ice dynamics associated with higher temperatures have caused glaciers to flow faster, leading to additional ice loss. Melt water lubricates the base of glaciers that carry ice from the interior to the sea, causing their movement to accelerate (for example, the speed of Greenland’s largest outlet glacier doubled in just five years). Surface lakes propagate fractures through the ice sheet as they drain, further lubricating the base and weakening the ice sheet with a network of cracks. And glaciers have been calving into the ocean with enough force to be detected on seismometers all over the world. The frequency of th! ese “glacial earthquakes” has increased in recent years; in 2005, for example, there were over twice as many quakes as in any year before 2002. All told, Greenland lost 1,500 gigatons of ice between 2000 and 2008, more water than is used in U.S. homes and industry over a six-year period.
“In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica, too, is showing signs of a warming climate. Annual ice mass loss for the entire continent more than doubled between the periods 2002–06 and 2006–09. In March 2009, a 400-square-kilometer piece of ice broke off of the Wilkins ice shelf, the tenth ice shelf collapse on the Antarctic Peninsula in recent times. The most notable break-up was that of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002, which covered some 3,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of Rhode Island. The West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) lost 59 percent more ice in 2006 than it did in 1996. A fast-flowing drainage glacier of WAIS, the Pine Island glacier, experienced a quadrupling in its average rate of volume loss between 1995 and 2006. Previously well-established as stable or even gaining mass, the East Antarctic ice sheet may in fact be shrinking. A late 2009 Nature Geoscience study points toward a net melting of the ice sheet since 2006. This new discovery adds to the ever-growing fears of ice sheet collapse and sea level rise. With increased melting, scientists say sea level could rise as much as 2 meters by the end of this century.
“Mountain glaciers are much smaller in comparison to the polar ice sheets and, thus, do not pose nearly as great a threat to world sea levels. But due to their proximity and importance to human settlements, their melting is of grave and immediate concern. Melting mountain glaciers can create hazards like rockfalls, avalanches, and outburst floods from glacial lakes; they also have significant impacts on freshwater supplies. Worldwide, the average annual rate of mountain glacier melt was over twice as great between 1996 and 2005 as during the previous decade. The World Glacier Monitoring Service named 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, the eighteenth consecutive year of retreat for the 30 reference glaciers measured since 1976.
“The glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau make up the largest body of ice outside the poles and provide water to Asia’s major river systems, which supply water to over 2 billion people. This water is vital for drinking and for irrigating the wheat and rice crops in China and India, the largest in the world. In recent years, Himalayan glaciers have been retreating at rates ranging from 10 to 60 meters per year. As the glaciers disappear, the dry-season flows of river systems that depend on them may decrease by up to 70 percent, making them seasonal rivers. River systems at risk include the Yangtze, Yellow, Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra.
“The Andes, home to 90 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, are also experiencing rapid melt and a shrinking water supply: between the early 1970s and 2006, Peruvian and Bolivian glaciers lost about one third of their surface area. In Peru, glacier and snow melt provides 80 percent of the fresh water, used not only for drinking but also for hydroelectricity, which supplies more than 80 percent of the country’s power. In neighboring Bolivia, the La Paz governor is already anticipating severe water shortages and considering a program for migration out of the capital city. The 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya glacier, home of the country’s only ski resort, disappeared in 2009.
“The glaciers of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, long cultural and spiritual icons, decreased in area by 84 percent between 1912 and 2007 and continue to melt rapidly. In Alaska, 98 percent of glaciers are currently thinning or retreating. And accelerated melting puts Montana’s Glacier National Park on track to lose its namesakes by 2020.
“These current ice loss trends are alarming, but perhaps more disconcerting is the fact that ice melt is occurring even faster than scientific models have predicted, emphasizing the need to cut emissions before the world sees ice sheet collapse, catastrophic inundation of low-lying coastal areas, and widespread water and food shortages. After all, in the words of Stockholm University professor Johan Rockström, ‘We don’t know how to refreeze the Greenland ice sheet.’”
While the reptilian part of the brain may be tempted to think that China and India deserve what’s coming to them, given their COP15 negotiating positions, the likely social, economic and environmental consequences will be off the scale - so we need to think mammalian.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/do-you-want-ice-with-that/.
- John ElkingtonCOP15: Politics of the Liferaft
“Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, “with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport.” Increasingly, the take on COP15 is that it failed in almost every department, aside from the rhetoric about keeping the rise in average temperatures below 2 degrees C. Even the COP15 website itself admits that scientists and NGOs are pretty much uniformly “shell-shocked”.
In the eye of the storm: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
God knows how the delegates put up with it, from (1) the leak of the “Danish text” of a set of proposals prepared in advance of COP15 by a group of rich countries through (2) to Sudan lecturing the world on human rights and (3) to the number of observer passes being cut from 15,000 to just 90. people made the best of it: One entrepreneurial colleague, for example, ended up sleeping behind a temporary wall in the conference centre, to avoid the cull of observers - and then benefitted from an amnesty, being allowed to stay in.
On the face of it, however, this has been one of the most shambolic exercises in UN-led global governance for quite some time. Still, even though I have always avoided such events, finding the endless horse-trading profoundly wildly inappropriate to the nature and scale of the challenges we face, COP15 did at least illuminate the fault-lines in emergent twenty-first century politics - very much like an X-ray shows the invisible weaknesses in metals and ceramics.
I’m not sure the image will play well outside the UK, but the Sunday Times today has Obama’s face dropped into a photograph of Neville Chamberain returning from his meeting with “Mr. Hitler”, brandishing his meaningless piece of paper. Obama, who I admire enormously, now seems to have been wrong-footed twice in Copenhagen - and it is tempting to agree that he shouldn’t have turned up for COP15, given his profound distraction from the climate agenda because of US health care politics. America is divided on climate, as on so many issues, and the sense of a country adrift grows apace.
In many ways, it is unfair to heap the blame onto China, as Obama and others have tried to do - but the giant country clearly has much to learn about how to operate diplomatically on the world scene. Meanwhile, there is plenty of blame to go around, with fractious internal politics during the conference within Denmark, the host country, within the EU, and pretty much in most other directions you care to point out. What we saw was what I am tempted to call ‘Liferaft Politics’, with endless squabbles for the tiller, water and food - and desperate struggles to determine who’s in and who’s out.
Once again, I’m glad not to have been involved. But this is a desperately sad - and (not to put too fine a point on it) potentially civilisation-threatening - outcome. Many eyes will now switch to the ‘Road to Mexico’, and COP16, but I am tempted to agree with Julian (Lord) Hunt, a former Director-General of the UK Meteorological Office. Writing in today’s Observer, he warns that we may be heading towards a future in which no comprehensive successor to the Kyoto regime is possible. “It is therefore crucial,” he says, “that the centre of gravity of decision-making on how we respond to climate change moves towards the sub-national level. The need for such a shift from ‘top down’ to ‘bottom up’ is becoming clearer by the day.”
Business organisations are already lamenting the failure to agree on a clear, predictable framework to regulate and drive down greenhouse emission - an analysis which is understandable, as far as it goes. But, at the same time, the spotlight is likely to shift from the muscle-bound, strangulated, sclerotic world of mainstream public and private sector leadership to new generations of innovators, entrepreneurs and investors who plunge in and create the future in the face of seemingly impossible odds.
That’s where we are focusing our efforts at Volans. The need to harness the Power of Unreasonable People is greater than ever. So I head towards 2010 not so much angry with the short-sightedness and self-interest of today’s political incumbents (I may be politically naive and a little romantic, but I’m not completely stupid) as determined to do our damnedest to answer the question, “If not COP, what?”
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/cop15-politics-of-the-liferaft/.
- John ElkingtonSOTP CLIMATE CHANGE
No, its not a typo, but a rather astute way to kick-off a series of blogs from the COP15 summit in Copenhagen: Geoff Lye, a Volans Co-Founder who is there with Gary Kendall of SustainAbility writes:
I subscribe to the view that perfection must not stand in the way of the good in all things including COPs, but let’s hope the final version of the draft text is better than this:
I laughed out loud.
Read their insightful blogs here
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/sotp-climate-change/.
- Sam LakhaPopulation Control at Volans
Source: Wikipedia
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/population-control-at-volans/.
- John ElkingtonShokay seeks a CEO
Shokay (www.shokay.com), the world’s first lifestyle brand focused on the yak, features adult wear and adult accessories. Shokay prides itself not only in its classic and modern designs, but also its social impact. Shokay sources yak down, comparable in warmth and softness to cashmere, is hand combed by Tibetan herders. Part of our product line is hand knit by women in rural areas of China. We enable marginalized populations in rural China to earn a sustainable living. Shokay currently has 2 retail stores and distributes products to boutiques globally in over 10 countries, including Europe, Japan, Australia, and US.
Background
Shokay, founded in 2006, is a fast growing company that is known as one of the leading examples of social enterprise in the Greater China region. In three years time, the original co-founders, Marie So and Carol Chyau, have built the business from a mere idea to a 20 person company. The operations team is based in Shanghai. We also have staff in Xining, Qinghai, and a small hand knitting production base in Chongming. Shokay has won numerous recognitions, from business plan competitions to social enterprise fellowships.
Shokay is at that exciting and challenging juncture between start-up and growth, and we are looking for a CEO to join the team and lead the business to the next stage based on the foundations we have built.
Requirements
- Entrepreneurial, innovative, passionate
- 7-10 years experience in lifestyle brand, fashion or textiles industry
- Experience in start up ; growth phase companies
- Experience in brand management
- Committed to innovative social change
Location: Shanghai, Hong Kong
Compensation: Will further be discussed, with significant component being equity
Contact: If you are interested in this position, please feel free to contact Marie (marie@shokay.com) and Carol (carol@shokay.com)
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/shokay-seeks-a-ceo/.
- Kevin TeoCommencement: End of One Journey, Starting Point of Another
Back in the USA after my internship with Volans, I was delighted this week to have received an amazing amount of curious enthusiasm from the audience after my oral defence of my MBA thesis. This focused on the sustainability and social entrepreneurship agendas, seen through the lens of microinsurance.
Having attended various business classes for over a year, I had been slightly on edge about my topic being “peculiar”. And it was, to some degree, very different from the topics chosen by many of my fellow classmates, most of whom were discussing specific areas such as marketing or operation management, their presentations full of matrices, economic assumptions and scenario planning on profits and losses.
Looking back, I had come to the MBA course largely hoping to become more “grounded” in business, but ended up on a quite unexpected trajectory.
The Pareto Law, I now see, applies with considerable force here. For me, at least, the learning that will have the most lasting impact has been condensed in a single course, around leadership and sustainability development. Of the 15 months of the program, the richest learning period was my 3-month Volans journey, where the pivotal moment happened when I met John. At the same time, all the small and seemingly irrelevant questions about the world’s future, the role of business, and the role of myself, which once had lurked somewhere at the back of my head, will now powerfully shape my future objectives and direction.
I do not mean to understate the value of courses such as Accounting (taught in the USA) and Marketing (taught in France), where – in both cases - I happened to top the class. However, at its best, business education can have a more profound impact, touching the mind and heart of future leaders.
As the Irish poet Yeats put it, education – again at its best - is not so much the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire. Hopefully the fire fed at the business schools – despite the gloom of the economic downturn – will fuel inspiration, ignite entrepreneurial spirits, and spark the sort of creativity that equips business talents to push the boundaries and tackle wider societal agendas.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/commencement-end-of-one-journey-starting-point-of-another/.
- Jieying ZhengThe Power of Positive Vision
One key way of alerting people to the positive side of the great change processes we must drive in the coming decades is to use new visualisation techniques to help them experience the future. A case in point is the work of Arnold Imaging. We met Jonathan Arnold at last week’s Cineforum. I particularly liked their focus on urban density as an issue, seeing a need to reconcentrate sprawled cities. This was the subject of my postgraduate thesis way back in 1974, when - among other things - I contrasted the urban visions of Frank Lloyd Wright and his erstwhile student, Paulo Soleri, whose Arcosanti I visited in 1973.
As Jonathan puts it: “The Future We Want exhibit, website, and educational curriculum will paint a positive vision for a sustainable future. [The linked] video is an example of the quality of videos that will be shown in the exhibit and site. A combination of live action filming and computer generated graphics are used to touch the viewer emotionally and show how walkable urban places can offer a high quality of life and a lower carbon footprint.”
For more information and to watch the video, please contact jarnold@arnoldimaging.com or visit futurewewant.org.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/the-power-of-positive-vision/.
- John Elkington60% of Citizens Support Government Action on Climate
In the midst of the global recession, GlobeScan’s new 23-country survey of public attitudes to climate change found that over 60 percent support their governments making investments to address the climate challenge even if these investments hurt the economy. And majorities in almost half the countries polled want their government to “play a leading role in setting ambitious targets to address climate change” at Copenhagen. Especially in Europe, Canada and Australia.
Public concern about climate change is at its highest level since GlobeScan began international tracking in 1998. Nearly two thirds of those polled now say climate change is a “very serious” problem. However, concern has fallen in China and the USA. On the eve of the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, only six per cent of the 24,000 people polled want their government to oppose a climate deal being reached in Denmark.
However, the poll finds that public opinion in the world’s two largest emitters of CO2 is more ambivalent. While the Chinese are the most likely to support government investments to address climate change even if these harm the economy (with 89% in favour), only 52% of Americans feel the same way. Also, the percentage of American (45%) and Chinese citizens (57%) who see climate change as “very serious” is below the 23-country average of 64%.
Majorities in major European nations support their government playing a strong leadership role in Copenhagen—62% in the UK, 57% in France, and 55% in Germany. Other governments being pressed by their citizens to show leadership include Canada (61%), Australia (57%), Japan (57%), and Brazil (53%).
In comparison, Chinese opinion about Copenhagen favours a “moderate approach” involving “only gradual action” (49%) over a “leadership approach” (37%). In the United States, 36% favour a “moderate approach” and 14% oppose any agreement, outweighing the 46% of Americans who want their government to show leadership.
The results are drawn from a survey of 24,071 adult citizens in 23 countries, conducted by the international polling firm GlobeScan between 19 June and 13 October, 2009. For more information, see http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbc2009_climate_change/
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/60-of-citizens-support-government-action-on-climate/.
- John ElkingtonHagar seeks a CEO for the Hagar Social Enterprise Group
The HSEG CEO oversees and develops Hagar’s social enterprise investments, including establishing performance targets (social and financial), engaging in strategic business planning, and pursuing new social enterprise growth opportunities.
The CEO plays a key role in the monitoring and evaluation of investments, and ensures that each enterprise serves Hagar’s social mission and integrates with country-level social programs. Furthermore, the CEO ensures that enterprises receive the support and resources necessary to meet financial and social objectives.
For full details on this position, click here.
Interested candidates should send a cover letter and resume to Myles Harrison, Co-CEO of Hagar International (myles.harrison [at] hagarinternational.org).
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/hagar-seeks-a-ceo-for-the-hagar-social-enterprise-group/.
- Kevin TeoClimate Scoreboard - keep track of COP15
Here’s a clever idea. Sustainability Institute has launched the Climate Scoreboard, an online tool that allows anyone to track progress in the ongoing negotiations to produce an international climate treaty. The Scoreboard allows users to check, on a daily basis, whether proposals in the treaty process commit countries to enough greenhouse gas emissions reductions to achieve widely expressed goals, such as limiting future warming to 1.5 to 2.0°C (2.7° to 3.6°F) above pre-industrial temperatures.
The Scoreboard will follow the negotiations in Copenhagen from day to day, and continue tracking progress in the months following the conference, addressing the question: if current proposals for emissions reductions were implemented how much future warming would be avoided?
In advance of the opening of the Copenhagen Conference, the Scoreboard shows that, while current proposals would reduce warming in 2100 relative to a scenario with no reductions in emissions, proposals are not yet ambitious enough to limit temperature increase to 2°C (3.6°F) over pre-industrial temperatures. The Scoreboard estimates a temperature increase of 3.8°C (7.0°F) over pre-industrial if current proposals were implemented as compared to a 4.8°C (8.7°F) temperature increase by 2100 without emissions reductions.
The Scoreboard results are delivered as a widget that can be embedded in media reports, blogs, websites, and Facebook. I confess that I haven’t checked the guts of the analysis, but this seems like a truly great way to make COP15 accessible to the wider world.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/climate-scoreboard-keep-track-of-cop15/.
- John ElkingtonThe Road to Ecotopia
Spent the day at Cineforum’s ‘Road to Ecotopia’ event at the old St Luke’s office building, 22 Duke’s Road, just across the road from Euston Station. Much discussion of how to shift paradigms. With around 150 people, this was one of the most enjoyable events I have been to in a long time, organised by Jobeda Ali and James Parr of Fair Knowledge - and with the backing of organisations like Tomorrow’s Company, IDEO, SustainAbility and Volans. Alejandro (Litovsky) led an all-day session on the biosphere, which I helped launch - but then flitted from session to session as a ‘Honeybee’, my duty to cross-pollinate.
Among those kicking off the event were Bill Becker, of the US Presidential Climate Action Plan, and Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute. One of my favourite sessions was up in Nest 3, led by Louis Savy of Sci-Fi-London, which organises the London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film. Also very struck by the visualization work of Jonathan Arnold - and by a session on China led by Andrew Leung.
The day ended with a session in which Hazel Henderson and Fritjof Capra beamed in from the US, with Hazel using the opportunity to launch a new Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard, which tracks private investment in companies growing the green economy globally. “This new, never before reported number, showing $1,248,740,645,993.00 (over $1.248 trillion) in total investment since 2007, indicates how investors and entrepreneurs are leading governments in promoting sustainable growth,” she noted.
The scoreboard totals investments in solar, wind, geothermal, ocean/hydro, energy efficiency and storage, and agriculture. It purposefully omits nuclear, “clean coal,” carbon capture and sequestration, and biofuels. It indicates which investments have been publically announced and committed by major companies for 2010 and beyond.
The address for this blog entry is: http://www.volans.com/2009/12/the-road-to-ecotopia/.
- John Elkington