Break the mould
Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission.
Plaintive images of polar bears on rapidly melting ice flows are all well and good, but what’s that got to do with life in the Bullring?
If it’s true that every cloud has a silver lining, then it may just be that the threat of climate change will provide exactly the stimulus we need to transform outmoded 20th century cities into vibrant places where people just love to live.
Look at it this way. We spent the best part of 60 years putting cars before people, shopping before sharing, and grim places before green spaces. In the process, we have pretty much taken the heart and soul out of our cities. Apart from a few visionary planners and urban idealists, we have stood more or less idly by as this particular model of progress either seduced us into compliance or simply rolled over us. Now, at last, we have a chance to do things very differently, to bring our cities alive again through the kind of people-first, nature-friendly, very-low-carbon make-over that might otherwise never have made it off the drawing boards. Genuinely breaking the mould.
And Birmingham is indeed a good city to be taking a real crack at this one. There is nothing soft or ‘alternative’ about Birmingham. It’s the kind of city that just is what it says it is on the tin: down to earth, entrepreneurial, forward-looking, not glamorous (indeed, comfortable in its own grittiness), and often a pioneer.
One of the things I most like about the Climate Change Festival is the emphasis on having fun. Invitations to sackcloth-and-ashes parties with the Riders of the Apocalypse as the lead entertainment, and humble-pie and home-spun lentil burgers as the only items on the menu, have proved to be enduringly unpopular with people over the years. If we’re going down, we may as well go down with attitude and in style.
But let’s just deal with that “going down” bit. Frankly, news coming in on the climate change front is just about as grim as it gets: emissions of C02 and other greenhouse gases are rising faster than anticipated; some impacts are already developing faster and deeper than scientists had been predicting in their worst fears; new data is cropping up on an almost weekly basis that makes the hard-won scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (in its 2007 4th Assessment Report) already look out of date; and the usual combination of indifference, inertia and political intransigence is proving as resilient as ever.
There is no point ignoring all of that. That is what’s going on. Thankfully, however, it is only half the story. The political stand-offs are a great deal less unyielding than one might think, particularly in America. All three remaining presidential candidates are firmly committed to introducing a cap-and-trade scheme for C02 - a bit like our emissions trading scheme here in Europe; City Mayors and State Governors are competing amongst themselves to see who can decarbonise the fastest, and Arnie Schwarzenegger’s somewhat surreal brand of ‘muscular environmentalism’ has had a major impact on the Republican Party; sales of SUVs are plummeting; business has seen the writing on the wall, and the sad, too-little, too-late posturing on the part of George Bush makes him look not so much a lame-duck as a legless duck.
The crunch point in all this comes at the end of 2009 in Copenhagen when world leaders will have to sign off on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which is time-limited only until the end of 2012.And I may of course be wrong on this one (I certainly have been before!) but I get a distinct sense that a meaningful global agreement is looking far more likely now than at any time over the last 15 years. Even if that doesn’t happen (or doesn’t happen until 2012 itself), you can rest assured that the burgeoning ‘coalition of the willing’ who want to make an urgent reality of low-carbon living will just get on with things anyway. Especially here in the UK (which is one of the few countries ‘doing OK’ on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases), and especially in some of our big cities – including Birmingham.
So the first thing we have to do is to make it relevant. Plaintive images of polar bears on rapidly melting ice flows are all well and good, but what’s that got to do with life in the Bullring? George Marshall, one of today’s most effective communicators on climate change, opens his “Carbon Detox” step-by-step guide to getting real about climate change with a very appropriate anecdote:
“A few years ago, I attended a scientific presentation to Birmingham City Councillors on the impacts of climate change. It was a wonderful opportunity to engage and capture the imagination of decision-makers in Britain’s second largest city – an opportunity that was utterly wasted. We sat through half an hour of charts that showed the parts per million accumulations of obscure atmospheric gases and graphs that demonstrated the year-on-year changes in precipitation and changes in the ‘diurnal temperature range’.You can imagine how effective this abstract technical talk was with the practical-minded Brummy Councillors. What they needed to know was what it all meant: how much would it cost, what would flood, who would die? And even though they never admitted it, I believe they also needed to know how it would feel – what would the city that they love so much look and feel like in the future?”
He’s absolutely right – though personally I think we need a bit less of the ‘floods, bodies and bills’ bit.
What people in Birmingham really need to get a feel for is just how much better a place their very-low-carbon city will be by 2026 or thereabouts. Some aspects of this are relatively simple. For instance, we really do know a great deal about designing high-quality, low-carbon buildings, not just in terms of new build, but in terms of dealing with our existing housing stock. There is still a lot to be learned from countries that continue to do it much better than we do (such as Germany and The Netherlands), and getting good at this very quickly makes a great deal of sense. The Government’s target for all new houses to be zero-carbon by 2016 has focussed house-builders’ minds in a way that has never happened before. And with oil at $135 a barrel driving up energy prices all around the world, the fact that very low carbon means very low energy costs for householders is one of those synergies that we just have to squeeze every ounce of value out of.
Some aspects are much harder – particularly on transport. This just happens to be the only major sector of the economy where C02 emissions are continuing to rise. But so much of our thinking on transport is stuck in ludicrously outdated models of technology, infrastructure and behaviour. A new report called Mobility 2020 challenges city planners to think outside their car-bound boxes. It suggests new products to meet our changing needs – for instance making life simpler with a single smart card to cover all our travel, with journey planners, car-lending schemes and car clubs, green commuting and travel plans. This smart card would have optional add-ons, like sport, health and leisure membership.
Some of the research for this report was done in Birmingham, and it has to be said there was quite a lot of scepticism and apathy to be found! The standard response was to blame government (for not setting the right standards) or the car industry itself (for producing the wrong kind of cars) – though when researchers dug down a little deeper, it was clear that most people were completely unaware of the true cost of running a vehicle, let alone the full environmental costs – in terms of impacts on people’s quality of life and health, impacts of congestion on the local economy and so on.
Which just confirms that politicians (nationally and locally) can’t hope to engineer this low-carbon revolution without the active and enthusiastic support of more and more carbon-literate citizens. People who can see that carrying on with our business-as-usual, high-carbon lifestyles just won’t work any longer for us – let alone for those who come after us.And that means engaging with those citizens, informing them, enlightening them, surprising them, inspiring them – in fact, exactly what this Festival is all about.
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Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future, Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission; and author of Capitalism as if the World Matters; Revised Edition 2007 (Earthscan paperback) – available through Forum for the Future website.
