Latest Articles by Jonathon Porritt

China: The most important story in the world

Jonathon Porritt — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:53:00 +0000

China's development presents an extraordinary environmental challenge for the world. But there is still a case for optimism, argues Jonathon Porritt on the eve of his three-day visit to China.

In June 2006, the Chinese Construction Minister decreed that all Chinese cities had to re-instate the bike lanes that had been removed over the last few years to make way for the car. All civil servants were told that they must either cycle, or take public transport to get to work. The Minister was, it seems, determined that China should regain its global fame as "the Kingdom of Bicycles".

He will have quite a struggle on his hands with some of China's increasingly powerful city mayors, for whom the car has become a far more fitting symbol of economic and political success than the lowly bike. Every day in Beijing, for instance, more than 1,000 new cars are rolled out on its already highly congested streets.

That is just one of a seemingly limitless flow of eye-watering statistics about China today. The sheer size of the country continues to astound the rest of the world. And if your passion in life is sustainable economic development, rather than simply the environment, then what's going on in China is quite simply the most important unfolding story anywhere in the world.

If 10% of the 60 million people who live in the UK choose to reduce their energy consumption by 1%, it hardly registers as a blip on the world scale. But when 10% of the 1.3 billion people who live in China take advantage of its surging prosperity to increase their own energy consumption by 1% per annum, then the world had better take notice. Such decisions affect those of us who live in Britain and elsewhere as much as our fellow world citizens in China. In an interconnected and interdependent world, China's emissions are everybody's emissions.

Chinese politicians talk with justifiable pride of their enormous achievement in enabling more than 250 million people to escape grinding rural poverty, and to find jobs in the country's burgeoning economy. Living standards have soared; and average life expectancy increased from just 35 years when the communists came to power in 1949, to 72 years in 2004.

These social gains have been driven primarily by the economic boom – with average growth of around 10% over the last 15 years. But that has caused environmental damage on such a scale that the entire growth model for China is now imperilled. According to a report in Nature in 2005: "The losses from pollution and ecological damage [in China] range from 7% to 20% of GDP every year in the past two decades". The impact on human health has been particularly severe. About 300,000 deaths a year are attributed to air quality problems. Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China, and levels of cancer in such areas are amongst the worst in the world.

Things are going to get a great deal worse before they get much better. China is building a new coal-fired power station every 10 days. In 2005 alone, it added about 65,000 megawatts of new power generation – roughly equivalent to the entire power capacity of the UK today. It is already the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and is one of the most inefficient energy users in the world – emissions per unit of GDP are ten times that of the average for developed countries.

There is no point trying to downplay this: there is an ecological apocalypse unfolding in China right now.

But few are more aware of this than the rulers of China themselves. Just a few months ago, the 11^th Five Year Plan was unveiled by Premier Wen Jiabao with an exceptionally tough message that China could not follow the old path (which, he might have added, is the path set out by the West!) of "grow first, clean up the environmental mess later". It had to learn to grow sustainably - even if that meant growing more slowly.

The government's impressive targets for the next five years include a significant cut in total greenhouse gas emissions, a 10% cut in total pollution output (notably sulphur dioxide emissions and chemical oxygen demand), a 20% fall in energy consumption per unit of GDP, and a 30% reduction in water use (per unit of industrial value added). It's also developing a green accounting system that will include full environmental costs in its calculation of GDP – something that I would dearly love to see working here in the UK!

It is an extraordinary challenge. But China is capable of moving with great speed when it puts its mind to it: it phased out the use of leaded petrol in less than two years (compared to the decade or more it took us here in the UK), and has recently mandated emissions standards for all new cars that are at least the equivalent of European standards.

All of which guarantees an ongoing battle royal between those who see the glass as half empty, and those who see it as half full. The 'half-empties' look at the existing environmental legacy, factor that into the huge political and social pressures to keep the Chinese economy booming at almost any cost, and remain sunk in impenetrable gloom.

The half-fulls see no reason why China shouldn't become the world's number one nation in terms of eco-efficiency and the kind of "green industrial revolution" that Western leaders love to pontificate about. But they acknowledge that achieving this will take a lot more than some ministerial decree restoring the bike to its rightful place in the hierarchy of sustainable transport systems – however welcome that may be!

The author: Jonathon Porritt is founder director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, an independent watchdog to advise how environmentally friendly development should be put at the heart of government policy. From 19-21 September, Porritt is visiting China to describe his experience in Britain and learn from "our fellow world citizens" in China. Porritt will be talking on China's global role in Sustainable Development at DFID China's office, in Beijing at 4pm on Wednesday 20th September. Anyone interested in attending should contact: Deng Yongzheng, Programme Officer, UK-China Sustainable Development Dialogue, DFID China, tel: 86 (0)10 8529 6882 ext 2048, email: YZ-Deng [at] dfid.gov.uk

This article appears in “Greening the Dragon: China’s Sustainability Challenge”, a special supplement produced by Green Futures magazine, published in September 2006. www.greenfutures.org.uk

Homepage photo by Jayanth Chennamangalam

Sustainable development needs China

Jonathon Porritt, Matt Perrement — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 18:23:00 +0000

Jonathon Porritt was appointed chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission by Tony Blair in 2000 to drive forward the government’s sustainable development agenda. Here he talks to Matt Perrement about his work and ideas.

Today, it’s as though the whole world knows about sustainability. Civil society, governments, and large sections of the business community, all talk in terms of “sustainability” – a word now co-opted to so many other agendas that it risks being stripped of all real meaning.

“I blame Brundtland,” begins Porritt, taking me all the way back to the 1987 Brundtland report – written for the United Nations – which defined sustainable development as ’development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ If only she’d titled it sustainable economic development, rather than just sustainable development, which far too many people think of as another way of talking about the environment.”

But there’s still no alternative to ensuring that all future economic development, whether in the UK, China or anywhere else, is as sustainable as possible – from both an environmental and a social justice perspective, he adds.

“It’s about changing the manner in which we create wealth. It’s to do with making fundamental changes to the economic system.”

Economic systems (and the need to reform them) underpin a lot of what Porritt has to say. To demonstrate that point, his latest book - “Capitalism As If The World Matters” – introduces “sustainable capitalism” into the cauldron of ideas.

“Capitalism really is the only show in town,” explains Porritt, “and it’s here to stay. Therefore we have to work with the system we have,” adding that more radical green demands, such as tougher targets for renewable energy, are undeliverable. But he insists that the principles of profit are reconcilable with environmental virtue through what he calls “solutions-based partnerships” and “working with the grain of human nature rather than against it” – principles he has espoused since the early 1990s after his departure from front-line campaign work for the environmental NGO Friends of the Earth.

The flesh and blood of Porritt’s new optimism is Forum for the Future, a non-profit organisation that he co-founded in 1996 to work with the corporate world (and others) towards precisely that goal – balancing profit with sustainability.

One decade on, Forum for the Future describes itself as “the UK’s leading sustainable development charity”, with 70 staff and more than 100 partner organizations, including such companies as BP, Unilever, BAA, ICI and BT. Many of their partners have recently been criticised by environmentalists for a variety of misdemeanors. So what is the value of engagement?

According to Porritt, “All of these companies are on a journey. For instance Unilever has spent years developing its approach to sustainable agriculture, and this is now working through their brands. Greater consideration is now given to where ingredients are sourced and how they are moved around the world.

Despite his optimism, Porritt acknowledges that the process is slow. “There is still a long way to go for most of our partners,” he confesses and is reluctant to single out any company for praise. “On a scale of 1-10 [one being poor and ten being excellent] most of our partners are at about three; but without the benefit of engagement it would be even lower.”

Porritt also retains his enthusiasm for grass-roots activism, which he believes still has an important part to play in the wider environmental movement. “I left Friends of the Earth because I wanted a life-style change, not because I became disillusioned with it,” he says. The role, he said, consumed his life and left him little time for personal life.

Engagement, rather than opposition, will stand Porritt in good stead in China, where the government is circumspect about the role of civil society. Corporate social responsibility, on the other hand, has official approval. The Forum’s work in the UK can, at least in broad terms, claim to influence the latter agenda.

“Without China on board – 20% of the world’s population – the whole vision of sustainable development will fall flat on its face,” says Porritt, who visits Hong Kong and Beijing in a whistle-stop tour that begins on Monday.

“I will be wearing three hats while I’m there – one to carry out engagements on behalf of the British government’s UK-China Sustainable Development Dialogue, another to promote the work of the The Prince of Wales's Business and Environment Programme, which runs senior executives' seminars in Cambridge, Salzburg, South Africa and the USA, and lastly to do some work in Hong Kong with the Swire Group (whose companies include Cathay Pacific) on climate change and corporate sustainability. It’s going to be busy!“

Homepage photo by © Rob Welham

Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of the Forum for the Future, Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, Co-Director of The Prince of Wales's Business and the Environment Programme and a Non-executive Director of Wessex Water. Jonathon is also author of “Capitalism As If The World Matters”, which was published in November 2005 (Earthscan), and received a CBE in January 2000 for services to environmental protection.

Sustainable development’s “taboo territory”

Isabel Hilton, Jonathon Porritt — Wed, 30 May 2007 18:02:00 +0000

Faced with a warming climate, should rich countries consume differently – or buy less? And can poor nations be expected to do the same? Isabel Hilton interviews Jonathon Porritt.

Isabel Hilton: If you want to live sustainably and ethically, what do you do?

Jonathon Porritt: There’s a large question about that in the UK, let alone in China. The truth is that the vast majority of the two to three million Chinese who are now moving into purchasing parity with the middle classes in the west have absolutely no interest in consuming more sustainably. Things that are happening on sustainable development in China are largely driven by central government – unfortunately not in the regions or the provinces, which makes it very difficult. Trying to stimulate a lot of civic enthusiasm around sustainable consumption is very hard work. It’s still an upward curve of increased materialism, which is what they feel progress is all about. They think that they are just getting on this ladder and now someone’s going to tell them to climb it more slowly, differently, with fewer benefits than we had – that’s a very difficult sell.

IH: But is that the message of sustainable consumption? That people in developing countries must climb the ladder more slowly?

JP: There’s a very lively debate about that, of course. The sustainable consumption debate ranges from those who argue that all we have to do is consume more responsibly, ethically, sustainably, sensitively – and in a way that need not put any question mark over the method or the quantum of consumption at all. They argue that we just need to consume differently, not to change the volume.

At the other end of the scale, are those who say that’s complete nonsense: when you talk about the nine billion people who will live on Earth by the end of this century, consuming the way that we consume in the west – however ethically, environmentally or sensitively it may be, it will still blow the system. They want the concept of consuming less to be part of the political debate, but no mainstream political party anywhere in the world wants the word “less” to be used at any point in the political discourse – it’s just taboo territory. So what you get is a conversation about the manner – not about changing the core of the system.

For any Chinese politician, too, the dreaded word “less” is unthinkable. You have to have a bit of sympathy: it’s an extremely difficult thing for people who are just coming into consuming to be told that it’s all too late, that they can’t have any more. So unfortunately, the realpolitik of the situation is that we are not going to be able to argue for less consumption in India or China – or anywhere else in the poor world – until the rich world has already demonstrated a very serious intent to contract their economies. In the first instance, this means contracting the carbon intensity of their economies, which is a proxy for contracting the economy as a whole, and to reduce dramatically the social and environmental externalities of the economy. When we’ve demonstrated that we are serious about it, then it would be possible to open up a dialogue with China and India about consuming less in those countries.

Right now, the only thing you can say is: “consume much more intelligently,” because this is an appeal to the idea that China ought to be able to build a new paradigm of consumption, which doesn’t go through the massively wasteful, destructive and inefficient processes that we have been through in all western economies. We have come to the conclusion that this is all pretty stupid, and we have to become much more efficient in the use of our energy and resources. It isn’t necessary for the Chinese to go all the way through that wasteful and destructive curve. It would be possible for people in China to aim for the end goal, which is to improve people’s well being but with far lower energy consumption.

For example, at the moment most politicians in China seem hell-bent on creating car-based infrastructure in their cities, particularly in Beijing. An good approach to this would be to say that we can see that that’s going nowhere – the intelligent thing to do is to build an advanced transport infrastructure that is not based on individual car ownership. But right now in Beijing, if you don’t have a car, you haven’t made it.

IH: If you can’t make the argument in China, are you doing any better in Britain?

JP: Well, at least we’ve got a discussion going in Britain. Politicians are very nervous about anything that seems to imply that the conventional growth paradigm is in jeopardy. That remains very, very difficult. If you imply that we will not be able to rely on 2 to 3% economic growth forever, then politicians just do not want to talk to you. When we are doing our economic advisory work with the government, and trying to apply different measures to make the economy more supportive of sustainable outcomes, you can push hard on macro elements – like fiscal reform, or the way government uses different regulatory interventions and market signals. But should you trespass into rethinking the economic growth paradigm, they don’t want to listen. The consumption discourse has to be all about providing people with a higher quality of life, but with a massive reduction in resource and energy intensity. Within that paradigm, politicians in the UK are getting more serious, but it is still a painful process.

IH: That doesn’t leave much for the individual to do, if the individual is concerned.

JP: Because the government moves so slowly, it leaves a huge amount for the individual – and for business – to do. Suddenly all our big retailers, for instance, have gone very green on the issue of climate change, and they’ve left government miles behind. Industry has taken the lead and the government is half-relieved and half-anxious about it, because suddenly they aren’t sure if they are setting the pace of change. With business in the lead, the individual consumer can play a very big role. Besides, I don’t believe anyone is naïve enough to think that this is going to be sorted out by governments on their own. Government action without citizen buy-in is not going to work. Our government right now is thinking about communication and information campaigns, about how you work with NGOs, professional bodies and business to get the messages out more effectively. They are rolling out a new campaign called “Act on CO2”, which tries to persuade individuals to reduce their own carbon footprint.

IH: But government is lagging behind the people on this.

JP: It certainly is. The Sustainable Development Commission recently published our annual review on sustainable development in government, which is a report on the 11 key targets they have to improve their own performance – and the results are shocking. Five departments have gone backwards, not forwards. And despite all the attention on climate change, the majority of departments have missed their CO2 reduction targets. If this was a private sector report, people would be sacked. In my opinion, it’s truly shameful. You have a government that creates a great head of steam about climate change, with a high level of rhetoric about how important it is to do something about it, and it is not even delivering the basics in its own backyard.

IH: So you have published the list of shame.

JP: We have, but in a gentle way, as you can imagine.

Jonathon Porritt is founder director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, an independent watchdog to advise how environmentally friendly development should be put at the heart of government policy.

Isabel Hilton is editor of chinadialogue

Homepage photo by Mironabside

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China could lead the fight for a cooler climate

Jonathon Porritt — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 07:24:00 +0000

China may have become the default excuse for inaction by western politicians and idle citizens, says Jonathon Porritt, but its contradictions may even now help it lead in fighting climate change.

If nothing else, as we move into the final months of the Bush Administration, one has to admit that he has got a good sense of humour. After nearly seven years of applied process-wrecking intransigence on climate change (as dummy to Dick Cheney’s virtuoso ventriloquism), US president George W. Bush has now offered himself to the world as the only global leader who can rescue us from climate meltdown. Both Al Gore and Bill Clinton (whose Climate Change Initiative is beginning to get some real traction, especially with city mayors around the world) must be quaking in their boots at the prospects of “Bring-it-on-Bush” challenging them for star billing in the climate change leadership stakes.

To be fair, it is more or less consistent with what he was saying when he was still in complete denial on climate change and its potential impacts. What was deemed sacrosanct even then is the American way of life and the US role in the global economy. Nothing – not even a potential 3 degree Celsius average temperature increase by the end of the century – must be allowed to jeopardise that over-arching imperative.

So what he is now offering by way of climate change leadership is to act as an advocate for “mega-fixes”: geo-engineering on a global scale to ensure we avoid climate-induced catastrophe without having to change our current behaviour in any one single particular.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are already being invested in such mega-fixes. Some favour messing around in space, positioning vast parabolic mirrors in outer space to reflect back large amounts of incoming solar radiation. Others are fixated on imitating the effects of volcanic eruptions by using vast numbers of high-altitude aircraft to put sunlight-reflecting sulphuric acid droplets into the atmosphere.

A rival camp wants to fix the oceans by dumping vast amounts of iron particles into the water to stimulate blooms of plankton which will then suck the carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere before sinking down to the ocean floor to form the next aeon’s equivalent to the White Cliffs of Dover. Others just want to use bog-standard fertiliser to achieve the same effect. And no less a guru than Gaia theorist James Lovelock has weighed in with a scheme of his own, involving tens of thousands of vast pipes to bring cold water up to the surface of the ocean to speed the absorption of CO2.

Lovelock is right on one thing: if we continue to defer serious measures to address climate change (basically energy efficiency, renewables and carbon capture and storage), then we will get to that point where the only way of avoiding apocalypse – the complete disintegration of human civilisation – will be to try and mega-fix our way out of it at the very last moment: a small probability of success, inconceivably massive costs, but giving the boys with their toys their final day (literally) in the sun.

Counter-intuitively, I am much more interested in the possibility of global leadership coming not from the US but from China. At one level this is, of course, insane. Within the next few months, China will overtake the US as the world’s largest emitter of CO2.As the entire world and its dog now know, China is building one new coal-powered station a week. China is building more than 20 spanking-new international airports. China is as immodestly in love with the motorcar as are the Americans. And China’s environment is quite literally falling to pieces.

All of which means that China has become the default excuse for every procrastinating politician and idle, indifferent citizen who was never going to do anything anyway. “What’s the point, mate, with China building one new power station every minute?” Or words to that effect.

I have yet to hear a single politician mention that China is closing down more power stations than it is building, already has enormous amounts of wind power available to it, has the most aggressive expansion programme for renewable sources of energy of any country in the world, has set some extremely tough targets for improving both energy efficiency and water efficiency, and is just about the only country in the world to have done any serious legwork on introducing a better way of measuring GDP to take proper account of environmental and climate costs.

And there is much more in that particular pipeline too. Unlike our politicians (let alone our citizenry), who really don’t understand the immediacy and the seriousness of the impacts of climate change, China’s politicians absolutely get it. They are already experiencing those impacts, directly and very painfully, in terms of accelerating desertification, reductions in agricultural yields, saline incursion into key groundwater aquifers near the coast, changing patterns of precipitation, increased incidence of storms and droughts. As Dong Weng Jie, director general of the Beijing Climate Centre puts it: “Records for worst-in-a-century rainstorms, droughts and heat waves are being broken more and more often.”

A lot of this already translates into real economic costs – lost agricultural productivity, increased costs in pumping water, horrific health costs with tens of millions of people profoundly affected by both water and air pollution. Worse yet, from the perspective of the Chinese government, a lot of that pain translates straight through into rapidly rising levels of social dissent, with a significant proportion of the wave of mass disturbances in China today (more than 80,000 in 2005 according to China’s own Ministry of Public Security) attributable to protests over water, land and pollution. President Hu Jintao had another crack at the sustainability challenge in his opening address to the Communist Party Congress on October 15.

If “unsustainable” means anything, what is happening in China is just that. But unlike our leaders, China’s leaders know it. The fact that their sustainability problems go on getting worse doesn’t mean they are in denial. It’s just that the solutions can be costly, and need driving down through the party and political bureaucracies with infinitely greater purpose than is currently the case, especially as they haven’t yet managed to explain to their citizens that business-as-usual (as in 1,100 new cars on the roads of Beijing every day) just isn’t going to work. But who has?

What people forget is that China has already started to invest huge amounts of money in a whole host of clean-tech innovations – in wind, solar and hydrogen in particular. This may take a while to work its way through the system, but China has an eye as much on future export markets as on sorting out its own domestic problems. Many now believe that some of the most exciting potential breakthroughs on photovoltaics and hydrogen-powered vehicles will be coming out of China any time soon – and not out of the US.

And when you are training around 400,000 new undergraduates in engineering every year, compared to the US figure of 70,000, there is clearly going to be some kind of macro-economic strategy in place to move China on from being the “industrial workshop to the world” to much higher added-value, post-industrial production breakthroughs.

Trying to read China is massively complicated at the best of times – an aggressively capitalist system within the embrace of communism is bound to throw up an unprecedented cacophony of contradictions. So it is perfectly possible for China to be both the world’s most unsustainable and environmentally devastated nation on Earth, and the nation re-inventing the cutting edge of sustainable technological breakthroughs all at the same time.

Funnily enough, one can point to almost exactly the same set of contradictions in the US. The Bush Administration, for all its other egregious failings, has been pumping in billions of tax dollars to sustainable energy and waste projects, even as it presides over an economy that has got more wasteful and more environmentally devastating to the rest of the world year after year.

Little wonder that one apparently has to be a former politician, like Gore or Clinton, to get really serious about climate change leadership.

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 (in paperback), Earthscan – available through Forum for the Future website