Green Futures - No.70

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www.greenfutures.org.uk No.70 October 2008

Zero carbon for future homes Zero hour for a new capitalism Plus: • Can computers cool it?

• It’s 2030: when you look out the window, what do you see?

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Contents

Contents

Number 70 October 2008

18 4

28 42 36

Features

Regulars

Partner viewpoints

18 Green house effect

4

Briefings – The cutting edge of news and best practice.

16

17

Soapbox – Oliver Tickell calls for ‘close to source’ global emissions trading.

At the heart of low-carbon transport – Rail Safety and Standards Board

30

A thousand words – told in one big picture.

Getting to grips with aviation’s footprint – Entec

36

Taking stock on green investment – WWF

41 49

Offsets for everyone – TUI

Will new homes meet the zero-carbon test by 2016? Terry Slavin and Roger East investigate.

Photos: Konstantin Inozemtsev/iStock; REUTERS/Caetano Barreira; iStock; Petr Nad/Shutterstock

26 The futureproofers As Transition Town thinking hits the mainstream, Vicki Lesley and Hannah Bullock track the impact in city and country.

24 31

28 Zero hour Seize the time for sustainable capitalism, says Jonathon Porritt.

32 New Year’s Day 2030 James Goodman explores contrasting futures for a world wrestling with a new climate.

42 Smarter bytes, slimmer footprints Bill Thompson feels the weight of the online world.

American Eye – turning up the heat on colleges’ green credentials.

37 46 47

Forum for the Future Update

48

And another thing…

Martin Wright gets cross with Greenpeace – and productive on a train.

Letters The Knowledge In the first of a new series, the Co-op’s Paul Monaghan lets us in on the secret.

Choosing futures for the railways [p16]

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Tapping efficiency gains – Thames Water

Front cover illustration: JacksonBone

Green Futures October 2008 1

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Partners Partners Partners

About us Green Futures is the flagship publication of Forum for the Future. It aims to be a leading source of information, opinion and debate on progress towards sustainable development. Its focus is on communicating solutions and best practice in business, central and local government, universities, the voluntary sector and society as a whole.

The magazine is financed by subscribers, advertisers and charitable trusts, and by contributions from Green Futures Partners and the Forum’s Foundation Corporate Partners. Partners are selected on the basis of their demonstrable commitment to the pursuit of sustainable

commitment the pursuit sustainable development.toThey take anof active part in the development. take anViewpoint’ active partpages in thewhere debate throughThey ‘Partners’ debate through ‘Partners’ pages they share their views and Viewpoint’ experiences.

Green where they share views and Futures works withtheir its partners onexperiences. ideas for, and Green Futures with pages, its partners on ideas editorial scrutinyworks of, these to ensure thatfor, and editorial scrutinywith of, the these pages, to of ensure they are consistent overall aims the that they are consistent with the overall aims of magazine. the magazine.

If you’d like to join us as a partner, pleae If you’d like to join us as a partner, contact Lindsay Travis.

01242 262 729,please contact Lindsay Travis. l.travis@forumforthefuture.org.uk 01242 262729 lindsay@greenfutures.org.uk

Green Futures Partners Our Partners BT

Contact: Environment Unit 0800 731 2403 bt.environment@bt.com Aga Foodservice Group www.bt.com/betterworld Alison Neville, 0121 711 6000 BP www.agafoodservice.com Contact: Christine Dewey Ashden Awards 020 7496 4000for Sustainable Energy chris.dewey@bp.com Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023 www.bp.com www.ashdenawards.org First Choice Contact: Jane Ashton BP 01293 588851 Christine Dewey, 020 7496 4000 jane.ashton@firstchoice.co.uk www.bp.com www.fcenvironmentandpeople.com Climate Care GSH Group Michael Buick, 01865 207000 Contact: Neil Fright www.climatecare.org 01782 200 400 neil.fright@gshgroup.com Commission for Rural www.gshgroup.com Communities ICI plc Paul Pennycook, 01242 534056 Contact: Frank Rose www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk 020 7009 5000 frank_rose@ici.com Ecotricity www.ici.com Matt Thomas, 01453 756111 www.ecotricity.co.uk Royal Mail Contact: Martin Blake Ecover Belgium 07736 786 549NV Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500 martin.blake@royalmail.com www.ecover.com www.royalmail.com RWE npower Entec UK Ltd Contact: Anita Longley Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128 01793 892716 www.entecuk.com anita.longley@rwenpower.com www.rwenpower.com Sainsbury’s Contact: Nancy Turrell 020 7695 8181 nancy.turrell@sainsburys.co.uk www.sainsburys.co.uk Sun Microsystems Contact: Richard Barrington 01252 421834 richard.barrington@sun.com www.uk.sun.com/sustainability Thames Water Utilities Contact: Darren Towers 0118 373 9063 darren.towers@thameswater.co.uk www.thameswater.co.uk

2 Green Futures July January October 2008 2008 2008

Unilever UK Contact: Thomas Lingard 01932 261613 thomas.lingard@unilever.com GSH Group www.unilever.com Robert Greenfield, 01782 200400 www.gshgroup.com Vodafone Group plc Contact: Charlotte Grezo The01635 National Trust 672980 Mike Collins, 01793 817708 Responsibility@vodafone.com www.nationaltrust.org.uk www.vodafone.com

Housing Corporation Contact: Elsa Nigro 020 7393 2270 Skanska elsa.nigro@housingcorp.gsx.gov.uk Tanya Barnes, 01923 423906 www.housingcorp.gov.uk Noel Morrin, +46 8 7538898 Hydro www.skanska.com (UK) Contact: Sue Vincent Thames Water 020 8255 2500 Utilities Darren Towers, 0118 373 9063 www.hydro.com www.thameswater.co.uk The National Trust Ashden Awards for The Natural Step International Contact: Mike Collins Sustainable Energy Triodos Bank Louise Bielenstein, +46 8 789 29 00 01793 817708 Contact: Jane Howarth James Niven, 0117 980 9721 www.thenaturalstep.org mike.collins@nationaltrust.org.uk 020 7410 7023 www.triodos.co.uk www.nationaltrust.org.uk jane.howarth@sfct.org.uk Pureprint Group www.ashdenawards.org TUI TravelStep International Yvie Dear, 01825 768811 The Natural Jane Ashton, 01293 5888511 www.pureprint.com Contact: Louise Bielenstein Beacon Press www.fcenvironmentandpeople.com +46 8 789 29 00 Contact: Richard Owers RBS louise.bielenstein@thenaturalstep.org 01825 768611 Unilever UK David Graham, 0131 523 7453 www.thenaturalstep.org print@beaconpress.co.uk George Gordon, 01932 263000 www.rbs.co.uk www.beaconpress.co.uk Skanska www.unilever.com Contact: Tanya Barnes/Noel Morrin Climate Care Royal Mail 01923 423906/+46 8 7538898 Contact: Michael Buick Vodafone Group plc Martin Blake, 01252 528 681 tanya.barnes@skanska.co.uk/ 01865 207000 Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 www.royalmail.com noel.morrin@skanska.se mail@climatecare.org www.vodafone.com www.skanska.com www.climatecare.org RWE npower WWF-UKfor London Anita Longley, 01793 892716 Transport Commission for Rural Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 www.RWEnpower.com Contact: Nigel Marson Communities www.wwf.org.uk 020 7126 4125 Contact: Paul Pennycook Sainsbury’s Supermarkets nigel.marson@tfl.gov.uk 01242 534056 Yorkshire Forward Caroline Miller, 020 7695 3078 www.tfl.gov.uk paul.pennycook@ruralcommunities.g Mike Smith, 0113 394 9741 ov.uk www.sainsburys.co.uk Triodos Bank www.yorkshire-forward.com www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk Contact: James Niven 0117 980 9721 Ecotricity www.triodos.co.uk Contact: Matt Thomas 01453 756111 WWF-UK info@ecotricity.co.uk Contact: Dax Lovegrove www.ecotricity.co.uk 01483 412395 dlovegrove@wwf.org.uk Ecover Belgium NV www.wwf.org.uk Contact: Mick Bremans +32 3 309 2500 Yorkshire Forward ceulemans.bieke@ecover.com Contact: Mike Smith www.ecover.com 0113 394 9741 michael.smith@yorkshireEnergy Saving Trust forward.com Contact: Sarah Cohen www.yorkshire-forward.com sarah.cohen@est.org.uk www.est.org.uk Entec UK Ltd Contact: Francesco Corsi 0191 272 6128 corsf@entecuk.co.uk www.entecuk.com

Editors ROGER EAST MARTIN WRIGHT (AT LARGE)

Editors Deputy Editor ROGER EAST HANNAH MARTIN BULLOCK WRIGHT (AT LARGE) Deputy Editor

Assistant Editor HANNAH BULLOCK JON WALLACE

Contributing Editor BEN TUXW ORTH Contributing Editor BEN TUXWORTH Art Director JENNEY SERLE Magazine Design Partnerships, Special Supplements JENNY SEARLE ASSOCIATES/ & Advertising ANDY BONE

LINDSAY TRAVIS

01242 262729 Partnerships, Special Publications lindsay@greenfutures.org.uk & Advertising LINDSAY TRAVIS Green Futures would like to thank: 01242 Melan262729 ie Thompson (proofreading) lindsay@greenfutures.org.uk Shelley Hannan (web) Irma Allen, Whitney Kakos & Green like to thank: DavidFutures Lyonswould (interns) Susan Gransden and Julia Sussams GREEN FUTURES is published (interns) by Forum for the Future Melanie Thompson (proofreading) Registered Charity Number: Shelley Hannan (web)

1040519 Editorial Editorial Overseas House, Overseas House, 19-23 Ironmonger 19-23 Ironmonger Row, Row, London, EC1V 3QN London, EC1V 3QN Tel: 020 Tel: 0207324 73243660 3660 Email: post@greenfutures.org.uk Email: post@greenfutures.org.uk

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The opinions expressed in the magazine areisnotnecessarily those of Green Futures published Forum forforthe by Forum theFuture, Future nor any of its associates.

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Environmental Policy Forum for the Future is certified to ISO14001 standards. For full details of our environment policy, visit: www.forumforthefuture.org.uk Green Futures is printed by Beacon Press, using their environmental print technology and vegetable based inks.

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Editorial

Contributors to this issue include:

Often described as the UK’s leading environmentalist, Forum founder director Jonathon Porritt has never slavishly followed the traditional activist’s line on business – witness his book, Capitalism as if the World Matters. This makes him ideally placed to reflect on the lessons of 21stcentury capitalism’s first great crisis – and the opportunities it offers for lasting, sustainable change [pp28-29].

Editorial

P

ulling out of Cambridge station, the London train passes

a building site. It’s all quiet on that front – the time of the morning, or the state of the housing market? But the hoarding facing the railway line raises more questions than you might think possible in just six words: “Still travelling? Imagine a different life.”

Who is it aimed at? Not the students, anyway. They look upon gap years as a right and rite of passage, and travel (hopefully) as the way to pursue the imaginative life, however humdrum a version of the Thai – Aussie – Fiji trail they may actually follow.

Those in the working world who see travelling more as a burden, on themselves or the planet, have three basic options to alleviate it: live nearer work, work nearer home, or make the connection without the journey. Could buying a house on this site help with any of these three?

‘Reverse commuters’ working in Cambridge are a comparative rarity, so the slogan presumably isn’t aimed at them. Conversely, the ‘work in London, live in Cambridge’ brigade, the prime target market for developments so near the station, are buying into tedious daily travelling, not out of it.

So here’s what I’d like to hope (without a shred of evidence, or even much plausibility).

Maybe the advert is less about the location of the homes, than how they are built and designed – complete with home offices, ready cabled for the broadest of broadband. Maybe they are to be truly sustainable homes, maximising not only their energy efficiency, but also the scope for occupants to enjoy a lower-carbon work-life balance. Unlike today’s trainload of unfortunates, let alone their car-driving counterparts on the daily commuting treadmill.

This isn’t purely a pipedream. Zero-carbon standards for new houses, the subject of our cover feature [pp18-23], will be mandatory by 2016, and they do touch on lifestyle issues, though perhaps not enough; and yes, the ratings system does include points for home-office facilities.

The more we rely on the virtual world to keep us linked up, however, the more critical it becomes to keep down the carbon footprint of all that computing – as Bill Thompson drives home in ‘Smarter bytes, slimmer footprints’ [p42].

On New Year’s Day 2030 [pp32-35], depending on how we respond to climate change imperatives, the world will look very different, one way or another. James Goodman does more than imagine a different life: he sets out a series of contrasting scenarios for 2030. And describes how we might have got there – shaped substantially by our choices now.

The current global capital market crisis, raging wildly as Green Futures goes to press, should not obliterate those choices. On the contrary, as Jonathon Porritt propounds so passionately in ‘Zero Hour’ [p28], it only makes it more critical that we take the sustainable route.

Still travelling?

Roger East roger@greenfutures.org.uk

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Oxford’s Oliver Tickell isn’t exactly shy of controversy either. He’s a campaigner and writer on everything from food to forests, and his new book, Kyoto 2, has incurred the wrath of everyone from deep greens to Björn Lomborg. Hardly surprising: if you’re setting out to cut net carbon emissions by 100% via a massive global permits auction, you can’t expect an easy ride [p17].

As Forum’s head of futures, James Goodman gets to scan some distant horizons. This issue, he offers a sneak preview of 2030 – and shows how the way we tackle climate change today could shape everything from our fridges to our freedom tomorrow [pp32-35].

IT guru and ‘uber-geek’ Bill Thompson is the pundit of choice for producers and editors keen to capture a glimpse of the digital future.

For us, though, he looks at the virtual world through a sustainability lens – and finds a distinctly real life impact [pp42-45].

Green Futures October 2008 3

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Briefings

Briefings Unlocking the potential

“

“For every £1 we spend now on tackling climate change, we are saving our children anywhere between £5 and £20 at today’s value. Failure to act means risking economic and social disruption on the scale of the great wars and economic depression of the last century.”

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco CEO

”

Solar drives the electrics – and the car

Winning wheels ‘Cycling city’ Bristol heads push on bikes in towns That most familiar of all zero-carbon vehicles, the bicycle, is to get £100 million backing from the government in a drive to promote its potential as an urban alternative to the car. A dozen cities and towns across the country will share the grant from the Department of Transport to help fund a wide range of pro-cycling projects showing what can be done. Bristol will become the country’s first ‘cycling city’, backed by a £11.4 million award. Blackpool, Cambridge, Chester, Colchester, Leighton-Linslade, Shrewsbury, Southend, Southport, Stoke, Woking and York also get government money as they join the list of ‘cycling demonstration towns’. see page 7>

Solar all night?

4 Green Futures October 2008

£420 The average UK household’s annual spend on wasted food; 4.1 million tonnes of it ends up getting binned, says the Cabinet Office.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photos: J Bewley/Sustrans; Petr Nad/Shutterstock

Promise of homes as mini ‘power stations’ via solar PV link to hydrogen production Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have high hopes for their latest “breakthrough” in solar photovoltaics (PV). They envisage it not only powering our homes during the day, but ‘storing’ enough excess energy, by producing hydrogen, to keep the lights on all night – and keeping the car fuelled too. see page 8>

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Briefings

Adapting the capital Mayoral plan addresses climate change risks to London London’s vulnerability to the effects of climate change has spurred mayor Boris Johnson to announce what is billed as the first ever Climate Change Adaptation Strategy for a major city.

Johnson stresses that he remains committed to the carboncutting objectives of his predecessor Ken Livingstone’s Climate Change Action Plan for London. The new strategy, he says, is “parallel and complementary”. But it’s all high priority stuff, with hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters predicted – and 15% of the capital considered to be at ‘high’ risk of flooding, including ten hospitals, 75 tube stations and nearly half a million houses. see page 10>

India launches climate plan

India's solar century?

Above the waves, just

Proposals ‘too little, too late’ say critics Solar power will be “centre stage” in India’s strategy to tackle global warming, according to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Speaking at the launch of India’s first ever National Action Plan on Climate Change, Singh said: “We will pool all our scientific, technical and managerial talents, with financial resources, to develop [solar] as a source of abundant energy to power our economy and to transform the lives of our people”. And he promised: “Our success in this endeavour will change the face of India.”

In addition to commitments on renewables, the plan promises action on energy efficiency, and on water and habitat conservation – notably of the fragile Himalayan glaciers on whose meltwater so much of India’s farming depends. The plan also includes adaptation strategies, aiming to make agriculture more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

The launch is seen as marking a step change in the Indian government’s attitudes to climate change, moving away from its customary insistence that the problem was

Photos: iSrock; Martin Wright; iolo72/Shutterstock

Ikea DIYs it

the fault of developed countries, who should take responsibility for tackling it. But its lack of specific targets on cutting carbon emissions, on protecting standing forests and on expanding renewable energy, has drawn strong criticism from Climate Challenge India, a network of environmental groups.

The government has missed an opportunity to set the Indian economy decisively on a low-carbon path, argues Climate Challenge’s co-convenor, Malini Mehra. “This report has been written by bureaucrats, not visionaries”, she said. “If we are to rise to the challenge of climate change and make our collective future a secure one, we will have to show vision and leadership.”

Her views are echoed by her co-convenor Bittu Saghal, editor of Sanctuary, India’s leading environmental magazine. He describes the action plan as “too little, too late, too casual, too glib. It will do virtually nothing to fight climate change. It merely bolsters the tired international climate change negotiations engaged in by India. It may help us earn some cash, but it is not going to protect our people.”

– Martin Wright

A new shape for bright ideas

To help get more low-cost green products on its shelves, Swedish furniture giant Ikea is investing e50 million in cleantech start-ups.

If you can’t wait that long to get your hands The new investment arm, Ikea GreenTech, on green DIY kit, check out the new online store aims to work with five or six companies in from green electricity supplier Good Energy. areas such as solar, lighting, energy efficiency There, you’ll find everything from staple green and water saving, over the next five years. The products such as lightbulbs, to full-scale solar idea is to help bring their products to market PV panels, biomass generators, and ground as soon – and as cheaply – as possible. Their source heat pumps. They also offer advice on solar panels, smart meters and suchlike could planning and installation. be selling in Ikea’s own stores within three to www.goodenergyshop.co.uk four years.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

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Briefings

Victorian home of the future Camden showcases ‘heritage-friendly’ low-carbon refurb Yes, it is possible – to cut the climate change impact of a typical 150-year-old English home dramatically without ruining its character.

The London borough of Camden, which itself owns over 30,000 homes, has been showcasing its recently completed “Victorian home of the future” refurbishment project as proof positive of the power of conversion. Future tenants of the property will have to sign up to take part in an ongoing programme of monitoring, research and open days.

The 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions achieved by this socalled ‘EcoHouse’ refurb exceeds the current target of a 60% carbon cut across London by 2050, as set out in the mayor’s Climate Change Action Plan. Getting this far did involve costly steps, however, such as fitting new windows and electricity-generating solar photovoltaic panels, on top of the crucial and cost-efficient basics of loft and wall insulation.

The overall bill, a startling £330,000, did include hefty costs for structural repairs. Even so, ordinary homeowners may understandably baulk at the pricier elements of an eco-refurb, although whole streets or communities taking action together could expect significant economies of scale. And, as Peter Head commented at the launch event, “communities making the transition to ‘low-carbon emissions living’ earlier will be better positioned to address the energy constraints of the future”. He’s heavily committed to making that happen, as project director of Arup’s work on creating the Dongtan ‘sustainable city’ near Shanghai.

There’s good business to be made here, too. The Federation of Master Builders (FMB), in a recent report on transforming the existing housing sector, estimates the low-carbon refurbishment market at between £3.5 billion and £6.5 billion per year for 40 years. Recognising the shortage of the necessary skills in the construction sector, however, the report includes strong recommendations on training development for the industry.

69%

Meanwhile, the government has announced that it will channel £1 billion into improving home energy efficiency over the next three years. This response comes amid rising political pressure for more help for the vulnerable, as rising energy prices drive growing numbers into ‘fuel poverty’ – defined as needing to spend over 10% of disposable household income on keeping adequately warm. A new community energy saving scheme will focus on up to 100 deprived areas, while pensioners and more low-income households will get free or discounted loft and cavity wall insulation. Funding will come from the energy supply companies – mainly via an acceleration of the insulation work they have been doing to deliver under the existing carbon emissions reduction target scheme – and some government controls are promised to stop them passing on all the costs to their customers in their energy prices.

– Tim Nichols and Roger East www.camden.gov.uk ‘Building a Greener Britain’, FMB, www.fmb.org.uk

“

“Should we now explain to UK couples who plan a family that stopping at two children, or at least having one less than first intended, is the simplest and biggest contribution anyone can make to leaving a habitable planet for our grandchildren?”

”

Prof. John Guillebaud and Dr Pip Hayes, writing in BMJ (British Medical Journal)

:

The rate of increase in Amazon deforestation over the past 12 months. The first such increase in three years, it is attributed to a rising demand for soy and cattle that’s pushing farmers and ranchers to fell trees.

Eco-friendly elegance

6 Green Futures October 2008

www.greenfutures.org.uk

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Briefings

School report

130 million The number of bicycles produced worldwide in 2007. China made 87 million of them, and is by far the world’s largest exporter – although its domestic bike fleet has shrunk by a third in the last decade, while private car ownership soars.

Winning wheels

Photos: solarcentury

< contd from page 4 The lastest on-your-bike initiatives include investment in infrastructure, such as new and improved cycle lanes and bridges, and educational programmes aimed at encouraging cycling and improving safety.

Leighton-Linslade is set to introduce 20mph speed limits in some areas, Southend and Southport will focus on cycle training for school children, while Cambridge, where the city centre is as full of bikes as anywhere in England, will seek to spread the habit outwards to surrounding areas.

In each case, central government grants will typically be matched by local funding. This applies to Bristol too, where the city council has outlined developments aimed at doubling cycling in the Bristol and South Gloucestershire area within two and a half years. Pip Sheard from Bristol’s Friend’s of the Earth described it as “the best news for a long time. Sustainable transport is just what we want.”

Bristol can look forward to: • New and improved cycle routes, especially at busy junctions; • New cycle resource centres, where cyclists can park safely, shower, and have their bikes fixed; and • An on-street, pay-as-you-go cycle hire scheme called ‘Hourbike’.

Inspired by the recent flowering of similar systems elsewhere in western Europe (such as Vélib in Paris), it will allow users to pick up and drop off short-loan bikes at automatic lock-up points dotted around the city.

Sustrans regional director Adrian Roper hopes Hourbike could be the first of many on these shores: “The scheme could become a prototype for cities across the UK and help show people that cycling is often the quickest and easiest way to get around town.”

A spokeswoman for Bristol City Council, said: “Currently, about 3% of Bristol commuters cycle regularly. We’re looking to double that during the project. Our goal is to demonstrate that cycling is popular and that funding for the necessary infrastructure is a worthwhile cause.”

– John Clulow www.cyclingengland.co.uk/cycling-cities-towns

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Councils ‘must try harder’ on emissions, says sustainability watchdog What would it take for Britain’s schools to halve their carbon footprint?

Local councils now have a direct interest in finding answers. The CO2 output from their schools will be counted as part of each authority’s total under the Carbon Reduction Commitment, the domestic emissions trading scheme due to be launched in 2010.

The Sustainable Development Commission, which backs the move, has released a report claiming that schools could halve their carbon footprint by 2020. “When local authorities work collaboratively with clusters of schools, remarkable savings can be made,” said SDC education commissioner Ann Finlayson.

The report cites examples such as Kirklees, where the council is advising schools on energy saving measures and helping secure funding for them, and an initiative in Worcestershire where pupils help conduct ‘energy audits’, and follow up with a week of practical energy saving measures. Electricity consumption cuts of between one-third and onehalf have been achieved as a result. It’s the kind of achievement highlighted among the winning schools in the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy [see GF69, p44].

However, says Finlayson, long-term problems, such as a lack of investment in school refurbishment, must be addressed too. And action should not stop at energy efficiency on site, she adds. Heat and power account for just 37% of the 9.4 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions generated by English schools each year, says the report.

A larger proportion, around 45%, comes from the supply chain of companies providing goods and services to schools, while pupil and staff travel and school transport accounts for 16%. Local authorities could help reduce such emissions through their influence over transport and infrastructure schemes and school suppliers, the report concludes.

“Current levels of investment in new buildings gives us a once in a lifetime opportunity to create real change in the sustainability of the school estate and the learning it is designed to support,” adds Jane Wilkinson, principal sustainability advisor at Forum for the Future. She’s working on several projects with the National College for School Leadership that look at how committed headteachers can not only help create greener buildings, but can foster more dynamic, sustainable schools overall. – Alison Winward ‘Carbon Emissions from schools: Where they arise and how to reduce them’, www.sd-commission.org.uk www.ncsl.org.uk/leadingsustainableschools

Doing the maths

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Briefings

Solar all night?

Lewis starts to green the fleet

< contd from page 4

www.mit.edu

How many libraries does it take to change a lightbulb?

Lending light ‘Library’ scheme lets public get real feel of low-energy bulbs People do still harbour suspicions about compact fluorescent lightbulbs.

Must they be an ugly shape – or too cumbersome, their glow too dim, their light too cold? Will they fit their fittings – and work with their dimmer switches? A new free lending scheme helps dispel unwarranted fears by putting a ‘library’ of low energy lights at the disposal of community groups, schools and local businesses. The aim is to replace prejudice with first hand experience, and help convince people that energy saving need not feel second rate. The Oxfordshire-based initiative, now going national, is the brainchild of the Eco-St organisation, promoters of a range of ‘green lifestyle’ products and services. – Roger East

Hebridean hopes for hydrogen Island to harness renewable power through fuel cells This autumn sees the installation of a vehicle fuelling station on the Hebridean island of Lewis. The excitement lies in the fuel it has on offer – renewably generated hydrogen.

The launch is part of the wider Hebrides Hydrogen Seed project, whose vision is to establish a hydrogen economy within the islands.

“We have stacks of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, flying around us here,” explains the project’s Ruairi MacIver. “The limitation of exploiting it is that we don’t have a grid system to ‘store’ it. So we’re looking at other ways of harnessing that resource.” The islanders currently import their heating and transport fuel from the mainland, which ups the price by 10-15%.

The fuelling station, installed by Air Products, will serve a pool of hydrogen-powered cars for the council in the first instance. The hydrogen itself will be produced through water electrolysis, powered by electricity from the council’s biogas generator. (The biogas is produced by anaerobic digestion of organic matter in municipal waste.) There are also plans to use wind power to drive the process in the future.

The project organisers aim to expand its application to other vehicles such as forklift trucks and even the local fishing fleet. (Iceland has already made a splash with a whale-watching boat that uses hydrogen fuel cells to run its auxiliary engines.) Over the next four years, MacIver hopes to see micro fuel cell units in houses, too, which will be particularly helpful in a climate where central heating remains on for much of the year. – Hannah Bullock www.hydrogenhebrides.com

After the oil rush American lifestyles get greener as they tighten their belts in the face of high oil prices.

• 82% are making a conscious effort to drive less • 57% are planning their routes more carefully • 24% are walking or biking more Source: MapQuest

www.eco-st.com

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Photos: iStock; Vasyl Helevachuk/Shutterstock

What MIT has brought to the table is a more energy-efficient way of using solar electricity in splitting water. Their process, they say, can work at the domestic scale, whereas current industrial electrolysis takes place in highly controlled environments. “You can do it in a glass of water, at atmospheric pressure, in room temperature,” explains MIT’s Daniel Nocera. He works on the Institute’s Solar Revolution Project, which aims to enable the large-scale deployment of solar energy within ten years.

The key difference is the use of cobalt as a catalyst, which needs only around half as much electric charge as platinum to do the job.

MIT isn’t the only place experimenting with different minerals to do the job better – an international partnership of researchers claimed a similar breakthrough this summer with manganese. But Nocera certainly has the bigger picture in mind for his system: “All of a sudden your house has become a power station… it’s become a gas station,” he enthuses. The system could be particularly useful in developing countries, or remote areas where grid connections are limited, as it is a much more efficient way of storing energy than using batteries.

“This work is a step closer to being able to better harness sunlight,” comments James Barber, professor of biochemistry at Imperial College London. He accepts “it’s a long way from any practical device” – but it does raise his concern that the UK is not investing heavily enough in a renewable energy that, unlike wind and tidal power, could operate on a huge scale. In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for one year. Jeremy Leggett, chief executive of leading UK PV company Solar Century, said he was “cautiously excited” about the new technology, adding that “an integrated PV/fuel cell system would be fantastic”. – Hannah Bullock

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Pulling power Scientists link chain of kites to harvest wind energy six miles high They call it a laddermill – and they think it is “the third generation of wind power”. The device is essentially a huge chain of wing-like kites attached to a looped cable, developed by scientists at the Delft University of Technology. And its purpose is to harvest winds that are 20 times stronger at 30,000 feet than they are at sea level.

A high-speed jet stream makes the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland and Denmark especially good locations for kite power, says the project’s team leader, professor of sustainable engineering Wubbo Ockels, whose previous claim to fame was as the first Dutchman in space.

Explaining its working principles, he says that the pull of the kites in the ascending phase turns a rotating drum, which pays out the cable at a controlled rate, and simultaneously drives an electricity generator. In the descending phase, only a small amount of power is needed to reel in the line again, with the kites in downward gliding mode.

Experiments with a 10m2 kite plane have already produced electricity output rated at 10kW, about enough to power ten homes – or, in this instance, a small concert by a Dutch rock band. The researchers plan a larger version next year, and eventually envisage a huge 100MW laddermill, comparable in

GOING UP Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a power station

capacity with a 50-turbine wind farm. Ockels believes electricity generated this way could come in at just half the cost of onshore wind power – and that, despite their size, his structures would be safe. “If the wind dropped, the laddermill would drift gently to the ground,” he says reassuringly. – Giovanna Dunmall www.ockels.nl

Green crude

Photos: TUDelft/asset; Sapphire Energy

Tipping point for biofuels?

Oil from algae attracts attention as biofuel solution Algae biotech company Sapphire Energy has raised $100 million in initial investment to develop a sustainable version of oil that it’s calling “green crude”. So why might this be a better bet than other highly problematic biofuels?

First up, the single cell organisms – usually algae – are chemically identical to crude oil. So it’s much easier to extract the calorific content from algae than it is from a plant such as maize, which must be fermented to produce ethanol. Sapphire believes the process delivers 10 to 100 times more energy per acre than cropland biofuels.

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The latest UK energy trends

Secondly, the feedstock doesn’t require arable land; algae can be grown in open ponds or, more efficiently, in closed vessels known as photobioreactors.

Sapphire says it expects to be producing the fuel on a commerical scale within three to five years.

Steven Skill, an algal biotechnologist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, is excited by the potential, but he emphasises that the focus for biofuels shouldn’t be simply on switching from one source to another, but on extracting the maximum value out of that raw material.

He’d put his money on biorefineries, huge units similar to oil refineries which are designed to extract all the possible useful products from a feedstock. These industrial plants would not focus on just making biofuel from organic matter, but on turning out valuable compounds that can be used in paint, cosmetics and plastics, for example, thereby even further reducing our reliance on petroleum-based chemicals. “If you can extract higher value compounds out of the raw materials, using biorefineries, biofuels will become simply a by-product, which shifts the economics quite dramatically,” he says. – Hannah Bullock www.sapphireenergy.com

Wind 27% increase in capacity Biomass 8.5% increase in capacity for heat and electricity production Renewables 0.3% increase in their share of total electricity generation (though a quarter of that share is hydro power)

Nuclear 16% drop in output, due to outages for repairs and maintenance and the closure of two Magnox stations CHP 2% less installed capacity as 37 schemes close CO2 2% drop thanks to reduced energy consumption Energy consumption Overall a 3% drop, with 0.5% decrease in homes and 1.2% in industry

GOING DOWN Digest of UK Energy Statistics 2008 (BERR). Figures show year-on-year change in 2007.

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“You can tell [people] about changing lightbulbs, switching off lights and so on.

But I believe that what we can do without too much effort is to reduce meat consumption. I think that’s a lifestyle [change] which each of us has within our powers to bring about.”

”

Rajendra Pachauri, the (vegetarian) chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shares a thought about fighting climate change

< contd from page 5 Key action areas of the adaptation strategy include reducing fluvial and surface water flood risk, cutting down on the demand for water, and limiting Londoners’ exposure to high temperatures. The strategy promises a citywide urban greening programme, with green spaces and tree-lined streets absorbing rainwater and helping cool the city. There’s to be an ‘Urban Heat Island Action Area’, taking in the central London boroughs, where new developments will put special emphasis on such things as green roofs and mechanical cooling systems. Compulsory water metering “where feasible” is on the agenda too, along with action to promote rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling in new buildings.

Samantha Heath, chief executive at the London Sustainability Exchange, hopes to see more done to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. “A decent home in London must mean thermal comfort with good ventilation,” she says, calling for a major retrofit programme to achieve it. – Giovanna Dunmall www.london.gov.uk/mayor/publications

10 Green Futures October 2008

The percentage of annual manmade greenhouse gas emissions which result from livestock related activities, from forest clearance to the point of consumption, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The figure is made up of broadly equal impacts of CO2, methane, and the nitrous oxide from fertilisers and fuel.

Bin bounty Councils to reward residents for recycling Within months, UK residents could be cashing in on their recycling under a new scheme which has already encouraged Americans to go green on their rubbish.

RecycleBank offers an incentive approach to waste management by enabling households to swap recyclables for points that can be spent on selected goods. On average, around £25 worth of points can be collected on a customer’s account each month.

Under the system, which the Conservatives are hoping to bring to British councils “as soon as possible”, residents put all their recyclables in a bin which holds a special chip to record the weight. For each pound of waste, they will be awarded points.

They can be redeemed against goods offered by a list of participating companies. In the US pharmacy chains, pet stores, grocers and Coca-Cola all feature on the list of companies keen to improve their environmental credentials through the trade-off.

Ron Gonen, co-founder of RecycleBank, said the scheme had seen 90% of the population of some communities sign up by offering incentives which appeal to everyone.

In the most successful cases, it has reduced landfill by 40%. RecycleBank’s profit comes from a share of what cities save in landfill tax.

What stops people raiding neighbours’ bins to pocket more money is a monthly cap on the number of points each household can earn. “There’s only the incentive to recycle what you have, but not to steal anything

Precious metal

beyond that,” says Gonen. “Because everybody has the opportunity to benefit, it’s that community aspect that motivates people to follow the rules.”

Gonen says that RecycleBank has been in direct talks with several cities in the UK, including the city of London and mayor Boris Johnson about the possibility of establishing its rewards recycling programme.

The scheme is very much the ‘carrot’ approach to encouraging people to recycle, as opposed to the ‘stick’ of waste charging or compulsory sorting. In the small Japanese community of Kamikatsu, the mayor has employed the ‘stick’, by forcing residents to compost their own food waste and sort rubbish into 34 different categories. – Louise Vennells www.recyclebank.com

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Photos: Emin Ozkan/Shutterstock

Capital strategy

18%

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Orchards’ richer harvest Studies unearth surprisingly high value of trees We should stop and consider the broader picture before we grub up more of the UK’s fast disappearing orchards – because they may be worth more than we think. So says a novel study by Forum for the Future. It suggests that the value of orchards could exceed that of seemingly more profitable uses of the land – once we take into account not just their fruits, but their role in supporting wildlife, encouraging regional tourism and providing essential ‘ecological services’ such as sequestering carbon.

The examination of six orchards in Herefordshire puts a price on these wider attributes – and in all cases, they outweigh basic profitability.

Profits from Village Plum orchard, for example, are around £4,500, but its total value is over £40,000 when you factor everything in, such as the ‘beauty’ and ‘peace’ it provides (worth £9,000, as valued by local inhabitants) and the carbon dioxide emissions it absorbs (about £5,000).

The analysis was carried out in partnership with the Bulmer Foundation, which wants to change the way policymakers view orchards.

According to Ordnance Survey data, the UK has lost 64% of its orchards since 1950, because of the demand for new housing and land growing cereals and soft fruits, and for grazing.

The trees in our streets, too, can be seen in a whole new light – now that a six-foot-wide Victorian plane tree in London’s Berkeley Square has been valued at a massive £750,000.

The estimate, which makes it Britain’s most expensive tree, uses a new measure known as CAVAT – the capital asset value for amenity trees – based on its size, health, historical importance, and the number of people living nearby. Christopher Neilan, a member of the London Tree Officer’s Association and creator of the CAVAT measure, told Green Futures that he hopes it will “allow public trees to be managed as assets of the community, rather than just as liabilities”.

38%

Photo: Reuters/Stringer Spain

The percentage of the UK’s water use that’s drawn from its own rivers, lakes and groundwater reserves. The rest we import, embedded in food and clothes through irrigation and processing – much of it from countries which are already water-stressed. A WWF report on the UK’s ‘water footprint’ points out that a shirt made from Uzbekistan cotton soaks up 2,700 litres of water – most probably irrigated with water from the rivers that flow into the fast-shrinking Aral Sea. Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer has become the first UK retailer to begin assessing the ‘water footprint’ of the products on its shelves.

Initially, it’s focusing on its clothing range, examining the water required to make the fibres used, and on five categories of fresh produce: lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and roses.

Visitors to Expo Zaragoza reflect on it’s theme of water and sustainability

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The tree is worth more than the fruit

As an indication of the scale of what’s at stake, nearly 2,000 street trees in London alone were “given the chop between 2002 and 2007 – most condemned by unwarranted subsidence claims”, according to Darren Johnson. He chairs the London Assembly’s Environment Committee, which recently produced its own Chainsaw Massacre report. Now local authorities can use CAVAT to compile their own estimates of tree values when faced with applications to chop them down.

Graham Simmonds, chief executive of charity Trees for Cities, puts the issue in a nutshell when he asks: “Can you imagine making a decision on the cost of demolishing a historic building and not taking into account its value to society?” – Hannah Bullock and Jon Wallace

Greening Whitechapel City market leads the way in waste recycling London’s bustling and colourful Whitechapel Market, selling everything from salmon to saris, has suddenly gone greener and cleaner – as the first market in the country to recycle nearly 100% of its rubbish. The council has given each stallholder two lockable bins. One is for green waste, and gets hauled off for composting twice a day. The other, for everything else, is sent for sorting and recycling.

“This is the best thing to happen to the market,” says Atiqur Rahman, a fruit and veg trader there for more than 20 years. “The floor is much cleaner… it’s good for the environment and it’s good for business.”

While supermarkets attract most of the blame for excessive food and packaging waste, it’s easy to forget that a street market can generate waste equivalent in weight to 55 double-decker buses every month. The weekly yield from the Whitechapel initiative is nine tonnes of food for composting and a similar weight of cans, plastic, paper and glass. Tower Hamlets council alone is responsible for nine other street markets besides Whitechapel, more than any other London borough.

How long before its plans to roll out the scheme to all ten are matched across the capital? – Julia Sussams www.towerhamlets.gov.uk

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2020 vision Renewable transport 20% Biomass heat 15% Biogas heat 5% Heat pumps 4% Solar heat 9% Hydro 1% Onshore wind 13% Offshore wind 19% Tidal stream 2% Wave <1% Biomass electricity 4% Other renewables 5% Waste energy <1% Tidal range 1% Microgen electricity <1% Co-firing 2%

How the government suggests generating 15% of the country’s energy needs from renewables by 2020, to meet EU targets Is there far to go? Renewable energy currently accounts for just under 2% of total consumption in the UK. The great majority of this comes from biomass (81.8%) (mostly heat), with large contributions from wind (8.8%) and large-scale hydro (7.6%).

Source: Redpoint et al (2008), Department for Transport estimates

The proportion of German electricity needs met by renewables in 2007 – up from 11.7% the preceding year.

The country’s rapidly expanding renewables industry supplies 8.6% of its total energy demand, employs over a quarter of a million people and is worth 25 billion euros to the economy.

The number of people employed in the renewable energy sector around the world, according to ‘conservative’ estimates from the Worldwatch Institute. Government policy is cited as key to recent expansion. Germany’s subsidised feed-in tariffs, for instance, have been central to the country’s boom in microgeneration, says the country’s Institute for the Study of Labour. Employment in its renewables sector overall rose 120% in four years to a total of 230,000 in 2006.

PV’s bright future?

Bending the light for fun and profit

Photo: Donna Coveney

Window coating could be low-cost solar breakthrough Price is still a real barrier to household-level photovoltaic power. But a special coated window glass, developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could help crack that problem. As a spin-off benefit, it could make colourfully tinted panes a new badge of honour for switched-on microgen homes.

What the MIT experts have done is work out how to use a special paint on the glass surface to trap sunlight in the pane, and emit it at different wavelengths, so the light travels to the edge of the window.

Solar cells located around the edge can then convert it to electricity.

It’s an “exciting” technology, agrees Richard Guy, advanced PV research accelerator manager for the Carbon Trust.

The crucial point, he says, is that the expensive solar cells only coat the edge of the glass, so fewer are needed. Other approaches use lenses or large optics to direct the light towards clusters of solar cells, but these techniques require precision engineering and funding. The paint coating promises to be much cheaper to install – and can also make existing solar panels more efficient.

“This technology has been talked about for 20 years or so,” says Guy, “so if someone can chip away at the practical side and make it cost-effective, so much the better. What’s also interesting is that you can re-emit the light at whatever wavelength you like, so you can make your windows fluorescent green or blue – which could have some exciting applications.” – Louise Vennells www.mit.edu

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Anaconda joins wave energy hunt

The shape of things to come?

Innovative design boosts hopes for UK marine power The world’s largest snake, which hunts its prey in water, has given its name to a pioneering new device for generating electricity from waves.

The Anaconda’s simple design, involving few parts, should help make it reliable and low maintenance, say its developers Checkmate SeaEnergy – while its ability to capture energy in a wide range of wave conditions means it could generate power at a much lower cost than other contenders in the nascent wave energy industry.

A closed cylinder of rubber up to 200 metres long and filled with water, tethered to the sea floor so it faces head on into the waves, the Anaconda uses the incoming wave’s upward motion to start what is termed a ‘bulge wave’ in the pressurised water trapped inside itself. This bulge then rides the front of the wave, in a similar fashion to a surfer, as it travels the length of the cylinder. At the far end is a two-chambered ‘power take-off’ section, where the ‘bulge wave’ arrives as a pulse that flows from the upper chamber to the lower one, driving a turbine as it goes. The resulting power is then fed to shore via a cable while the water returns to the system through a one-way valve.

“This is a novel concept which captures energy continuously from the wave as it passes, enabling it to capture far more energy

per wave,” says project director Tom Roach, from the Checkmate Group’s Flexible Engineering division. “Being below the surface it has virtually no visual impact, and as no water is sucked in or expelled from the system it poses very little risk to sea life.”

The Anaconda is still in an early stage of development, but it could be deployed off the UK coast within five years, claims Professor John Chaplin, one of the researchers leading the project. The Carbon Trust’s marine energy accelerator manager Stephen Wyatt, tasked with bringing along the most promising candidates, has high hopes for the Anaconda. “It appears to have the potential to make a step change reduction in the costs of wave energy,” he says.

“Marine power is still in its infancy,” admits a spokeswoman for The Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform, but adds that “this is an exciting and evolving sector with the potential to make a significant contribution to the UK’s energy generation mix in the medium to longer term.” To help meet its targets on renewable energy, the government is hoping to increase the installed capacity of marine technologies (wave and tidal) from next to nothing at present [see box, left] to some 2GW by 2020. – Julia Sussams

UK marine energy in motion LIMPET (Land Installed Marine Powered Energy Transformer) – a wave energy converter installed on the shore of Islay. It uses an oscillating water column created by wave action to drive air through a funnel, which in turn drives a turbine. Although it is connected to the Grid, the Limpet’s main function today is to provide a testbed for new turbines under development, rather than to produce commercial quantities of energy – so its present electricity contribution is pretty negligible.

Photo: EPSRC

Pelamis – a deep-water, grid-connected prototype previously installed at the European Marine Energy Centre on Orkney. Floating on top of the sea, the cylindrical, articulated sections have hinged joints that move with the waves and drive hydraulic motors. These motors then drive electricity generators. Testing at EMEC has now finished and the Pelamis has been installed for commercial use in Portugal.

£42m The unspent money still up for grabs by wave and tidal energy firms, if only they can ‘make the slipper fit’. Not a penny of the Wave and Tidal-stream Energy Demonstration Scheme budget has been spent since it was launched four years ago – because no suitable device has yet notched up three months’ continuous operation.

SeaGen – Installed at Strangford Lough, in July this became the first tidal flow device to go into operation. It can generate 1.2MW – enough to power 1,000 homes.

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Old World wine Sailing ship takes ‘slow cargo’ from France to Ireland Tesco made a splash last autumn when it started to transport wine by barge along the Manchester ship canal. Now a French shipping company has taken the concept of ‘slow freight’ one step further, sending a sailing ship built in 1900 to carry a cargo of Languedoc’s finest to Ireland.

Laden with a 23-tonne cargo of 21,000 bottles, tall ship Kathleen & May [right] dropped her anchor in Dublin on 25 July, after a weeklong crossing from Brest. It’s the first commercial trip chartered by the Compagnie de Transport Maritime à la Voile (CTMV), a freight business sending cargo solely by sailing boat. CTMV estimates the carbon dioxide emissions to be seven times less than a container ship plying the same route. The five vessels it uses aren’t completely emissionsfree because of onboard generators that power navigational instruments and the use of diesel to manoeuvre the boat into port or down rivers. But the company is currently

“

Vintage transport

working on designs for a new ship based on traditional models, which should cut emissions by ten times. Over the next few years it’s aiming to run regular crossings to Europe and North America, stocking up with cargo for the way back too.

But doesn’t the fact that the journey takes up to twice as long as it would by conventional vessel set the company at a commercial disadvantage? Founder Frédéric Albert

explains that his contract with importers recognises that the voyage varies from four to eight days depending on winds, and points out that wine sellers are keen to display the ‘Carried by sailing ship’ label on bottles. Of course customers pay a premium for this feelgood factor, as cargo delivered by CTMV is 15% more expensive than a traditional shipment. The company hopes to reduce this by 2010, with the introduction of a new ship that’s able to carry more freight.

Albert sees the enterprise as playing an educational role, too: “Consumers today don’t know how long things really need – how long wine takes to mature; how long an apple takes to grow. [Slow freight] is a pedagogic thing. If the ship’s late, it’s because it’s working with nature.” He adds that there are added benefits of sending the bottles by boat, too; the rolling of the waves apparently improves the flavour of the wine.

– Hannah Bullock and Julia Sussams www.ctmv.eu

”

Andrew Liveris, chief executive of the chemical company Dow

Admit it; didn’t that catch your attention much more than ‘save the planet’?

That’s the thinking behind this irreverent handbook on how to make the world end with a bang. The chapters set fun tasks such as “print on fancy paper”, “beef up your diet” or “give birth generously”, to help readers have maximum impact on the planet.

Authors Mark Townsend and David Glick emphasise what a central role each individual can play: “Even if you pursue only a modest selection of the suggestions that follow, take heart from the knowledge that you have contributed to Mother Earth’s mid-life crisis…

Enjoy the party my friend, you did in fact make your mark on the Earth.”

A London bride and groom ‘tube it’ to their own wedding. As well as opting for a 15-minute journey along the Jubilee Line rather than a spin in a vintage car, the couple went for recycled paper invites, local produce at the reception, an organic wedding cake, a secondhand ring – and a honeymoon in Europe by train.

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Photos: CTMV; Robert Thompson; Martin Warren

“Water is the oil of the 21st century.”

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Transport of delight Hydrogen takes to the water

Getting high on slow travel

GF tastes airship technology at first hand over London Cruising the skies above London, one of the world’s largest airships has been offering summer sightseeing tours, sky-high advertising – and the opportunity to discover what airship travel is really like. A cleaner, more civilised flying experience than frenetic jet travel? Green Futures went on one of the first flights from an East London airfield to find out.

The Zeppelin NT (for New Technology – made with carbon fibre and filled with inert helium) certainly offers a memorable experience. Filling the sky as it descends to pick up passengers, it seems more spaceship than aircraft. When it lifts straight up to head over London at about 70kph, the views are breathtaking: where else can you sit in a two-metre-wide bay window in mid air?

What about the carbon emissions, journey times and other practicalities? The Zeppelin NT uses 45kg of fuel per hour and carries 12 people, so we estimate it emits about 140g of CO2 per passenger km. That’s similar to a jet aircraft – but, travelling at low altitude, it doesn’t cause the stratospheric emissions which may double the climate impact of jets. And airships thrive on size, which is why those of the past were three times the length of the latest incarnation. Some estimates suggest that larger modern airships might have a climate impact 80-90% less than jet aircraft, with fuel economy to match.

As for speed, 70kph is a crawl, even if you do go in a straight line. But 250kph, a feasible prospect, would get you from London to New York within 24 hours. That might seem slow compared to a 747, but a big airship which offered a cabin and ocean liner amenities would let you enjoy the ride, sleep soundly and arrive refreshed – rather than ready only to slump straight into bed.

Size may also help address another major challenge for airships: all-weather reliability. The Zeppelin NT has a noticeable roll and pitch in the air currents, and our flight was delayed for a week by bad weather. That won’t win any customers, so future craft will need the construction and controls to stay steady and safe in wind and rain.

But with expensive oil grounding jets the world over, the investment could pay off.

John Christopher, co-founder of Zeppelin Tours, the company behind the initiative, says that plans for the future include a regular cruise from London to Paris and Brussels carrying up to 40 passengers. – Rupert Fausset www.zeppelintours.com

Barge breakthrough on zero-emission shipping When transport secretary Ruth Kelly addressed the International Maritime Organization in June, on the increasingly vexed subject of the shipping industry’s huge carbon dioxide emissions, she might have drawn inspiration from an unassuming canal boat on the Birmingham to Worcester canal. Because the Ross Barlow is helping to prove the viability of one of her proposed solutions – hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Professor Rex Harris, whose team developed the idea at Birmingham University, explains that the key innovation on board the Ross Barlow is how the hydrogen is stored – in the form of metal hydride powder, which then releases the hydrogen by decreasing pressure. As the powder doesn’t need to be kept at such high pressure as gas or liquid hydrogen stores, it’s a potentially safer and cheaper use of the fuel. And because ships need ballast to keep them stable anyway, the extra weight of the hydride doesn’t present the same problem as it does for car manufacturers experimenting with fuel cells.

Harris believes the approach could eventually be scaled up to larger craft such as passenger ferries, and in the nearer future, to freight vessels similar to those that Tesco and Sainsbury’s have been trying out on our canals.

Kelly’s other proposals to reduce the industry’s 4.5% share of global carbon emissions included bringing shipping within the EU’s emissions trading scheme, which the European Parliament wants to see done by 2013, and slowing down craft to maximise fuel efficiency.

– Tom Bamford www.hydrogen.bham.ac.uk/protium.htm

Putting the H on the H2O

Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Staff/Getty Images

Water miles

Q: Where do butterflies go when it all gets too much?

A: Butterfly Survival Zones. Twenty of them have been designated across Britain in a bid to stop the country entering a ‘post-butterfly era’. Butterfly Conservation is in discussion with landowners about using government grants to restore habitats on farms and estates in these key areas.

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Bees are being offered a safe haven too. The world’s first bumblebee sanctuary opened this summer in a nature reserve in Scotland. The flowery meadow is attracting hundreds of insects – so skylarks and swallows love it too. Bees are a ‘keystone species’, because their demise could have a huge impact on the ecosystem, not to mention the economy; pollination, largely by honeybees, contributes services worth £165 million a year to the agricultural economy.

Keen to transform as many road miles as possible into ‘water miles’, the Department for Transport has just published a set of maps highlighting the areas of the UK’s inland waterways with the greatest potential for freight services.

Transport minister Jim Fitzpatrick comments: “The role of inland waterways in moving freight is already significant, primarily in the moving of construction material, agricultural products, waste and liquid bulks.

We would like to see the market build on this success so that we can reduce the environmental impact of moving goods.” www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/freight/waterfreight

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Partner viewpoint

Track changes?

Commuters whizzing from city to city, freight taking the lowcarbon route by train… whatever long-term future we see for rail, the thinking must start now. Christian Wolmar compares scenarios for 2040.

that taking the train is greener than jumping in a car or catching a plane.

The maths certainly show that railways have a ‘natural advantage’ over other forms of transport in terms of carbon dioxide emissions per passenger mile – about half the impact of the motorist, and a quarter that of the plane traveller.

But will it always be that way? As car manufacturers develop new technologies and airlines start to trial alternative fuels, how will the rail industry stay ahead of the game on sustainability?

Eager to understand its own performance in the face of change, the Sustainable Rail Programme, facilitated by Rail Safety and Standards Board (RSSB), held a series of workshops on the future for the rail industry over the next 30 years. The results were four contrasting scenarios [see box] that should help identify the actions the industry should initiate today to position itself as a sustainable sector in 2040.

To inject some rigour into the blue-sky thinking, the exercise looked in particular at two variables: whether the government drives whole journey planning, or competition, between different modes of transport; and whether people travel more, or less, in tomorrow’s society.

This created some pretty diverse scenarios.

Cloud Zero, for example, implies low growth for the economy. In this world, personal carbon limits have radically influenced the way people travel.

The overall ‘travel pie’ may be smaller but rail freight is an overall winner in terms of its share.

16 Green Futures October 2008

In a more competitive framework that doesn’t favour whole journey planning, it is buses and coaches, aided by low-emission technology, that are able to offer cheap and low-carbon travel to passengers. Rail may fail to keep pace with the green advances in cars, but its real strength lies in offering congestion relief, particularly to commuters. In this Gold Stars future, carbon and resource metrics are

The scenarios Whole journey planning Cloud Zero Railways used mainly for freight Travel more Homeward Bound Rail travel mostly for leisure

Grand Projects Intercity railways thrive Travel less Gold Stars Trains provide congestion relief Modal competition

important but disputed, leading to a culture of claim and counter-claim between competing travel modes.

“The scenarios are deliberately designed to be extreme – to help flush out what specific policies would be needed to get to a particular solution,” explains Len Porter, RSSB’s chief executive. They don’t represent cast iron predictions of the future, but instead give an idea of the sort of challenges that lie ahead, and so inform better decision-making.

Despite their contrasting nature, they do all send out the clear message that transport will rise up the political agenda, energy issues will become ever more crucial, and sustainability an even greater consideration for policy makers. They demonstrate comprehensively that the rail industry cannot be complacent about the future. To retain and even increase its existing share of the ‘travel pie’ will require both the right actions from within the industry and support from government.

– Christian Wolmar is a leading writer and broadcaster on transport issues.

Rail Safety and Standards Board is a Forum for the Future partner. www.rssb.co.uk

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photos: Clive Watkins/Shutterstock

I

t’s not a bad assumption

In a second scenario, Homeward Bound, people again travel less – and work at home more. A taxation system favouring less carbonintensive modes encourages people to opt for high-capacity, electrified railways rather than flying abroad for holidays. Although overall UK travel falls, it is likely that the proportion of people travelling by train will increase – as might ‘rail miles’ in absolute terms.

But if increased investment and innovative technology help realise the integrated transport vision so beloved of policy makers today, we could see a scenario like Grand Projects. Here, increased policy intervention and travel mean business passengers travel between major cities on high-speed lines and get real-time travel information via mobile phone. Higher ticket prices would help recoup the cost of infrastructure and new technologies such as GPS.

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Comment

Soapbox

“Science says we need a 100% cut in carbon.

Here’s how to achieve it.”

Oliver Tickell calls for a global permits auction to control greenhouse gas emissions ‘close to the source’.

I

n Hokkaido earlier this year,

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This would raise $1 trillion a year for green energy, forest protection and climatefriendly farming

www.greenfutures.org.uk

the G8 summit agreed that the world should halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This looks like a serious target, but it has some serious problems.

First, it won’t be enough to achieve the UN Climate Convention’s objective, to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

To do that, the science indicates that by 2050 the world needs to be carbon neutral – not a 50% emissions reduction, but 100%.

Second, there’s no delivery mechanism – other than the Kyoto Protocol. And the Kyoto agreement has already proved ineffective. Its ‘flexibility mechanisms’, such as the Clean Development Mechanism, may have made carbon emissions a dynamic new commodity trading sector – but actual emissions have rocketed since it came into force.

In any case the Protocol's underlying principle, that you can offset rising emissions in one place by reducing them somewhere else, is inadequate. We need to be cutting emissions across the board.

Another problem is Kyoto’s country-based approach, assigning national allocations to emit greenhouse gases.

This not only means that negotiations on a post-2012 follow-up agreement get bogged down in squabbles over who gets how much; it is also illogical in the context of today’s global economy. If a product is made in China, by a company based in Singapore, using Australian coal, for a company in the UK, and exported to end users in the US, then which country should ‘own’ the emissions?

Under the Protocol we have a clear but unfair, even irrational answer: China.

The bottom line is this: to achieve serious emissions cuts by 2050, we need a very different, far more effective global climate agreement.

Here’s how it might work. Instead of allocating pollution rights by country, permits to produce greenhouse gases anywhere in the world would be sold in a single global auction. There would be a cap on the total number of permits, and the cap would contract year by year. Greenhouse gas emissions would be controlled ‘upstream’, at (or close to) source. For emissions from fossil fuels, the fuels themselves would be controlled, for example at the oil refinery or coal washing station. Other

industrial greenhouse gases such as HFC refrigerants, or CO2 from calcinating lime to make cement, would be controlled at the factory.

The permit auction would raise about US$1 trillion per year. This would be used to finance huge expansion of renewable energy, energy efficiency, the conservation of forests and other ecosystems, and climate-friendly farming. There would also be $100 billion per year to help poor countries to adapt to climate change, plus funds to address the health implications of a warmer world and the extra costs of emergency relief. These measures would be backed up by an international regulatory system similar to the Montreal Protocol (which controls ozone-depleting substances), applying standards for energy efficiency and eliminating powerful industrial greenhouse gases, backed by a multilateral fund to help poor countries do this too.

In this way, Kyoto2 would be a three-pronged fork: • carbon pricing under a contracting cap; • substantial funding to address the causes and the consequences of climate change; and • a regulatory system to penetrate beyond the reach of carbon markets.

It would be effective (delivering the UN Climate Convention’s stated objective), efficient (doing so at minimum cost) and equitable (among rich and poor, between countries and across generations). And economic pain would be avoided – because, as the cap contracts, improved energy efficiency and the large-scale deployment of renewable technologies will leave the world less dependent on fossil fuels.

Will the G8 do any better at next year’s meeting in La Maddalena, Sardinia, than it did this year in Japan?

One thing to give us hope is the knowledge that the new US President – whether McCain or Obama – is already on record as keen to act to solve the world climate crisis.

But at their 2009 gathering world leaders must understand that they can’t deliver the goods without a new and radically re-engineered climate agreement.

And that this time there is no room for failure.

‘Kyoto2: How to Manage the Global Greenhouse’,

by Oliver Tickell, is published by Zed Books. www.kyoto2.org

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Feature

Eight years from now, all new homes in England must be zerocarbon. Is that possible? Can we afford it? And who’s leading the charge to make it happen? Terry Slavin and Roger East find some answers.

Green house effect

T

Great Bow Yard was state of the art – but the best just got better

he future of housing is here

now – though you have to go to Watford to see it. On the demonstration site at BRE, the building industry’s research establishment, there is concrete proof that it is possible to build ‘zero-carbon’ homes – so energyefficient that they’ll need no more power to run than they can generate themselves.

The buildings on show there, admittedly, are streets ahead of the standards currently required on new housing developments. But watch those spaces.

Because a smattering of niche eco-housing specialists are already creating little clusters of green and pleasant homes around the country, and even attracting buyers, too – no mean feat in today’s housing market. And now Barratt Developments has become the first of the volume builders to put the lessons of the prototypes into mass production, on a 200-home site at Hanham Hall near Bristol.

In eight years’ time this won’t be exceptional: it’ll be the rule. Every new home built in England from 2016 onwards must, by law, be zero-carbon.

18 Green Futures October 2008

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Builders have had to throw away their templates and come up with something new

It’s quite some target – nothing less than the world’s most ambitious programme to upgrade the energy performance of new homes. Since May 2008, all new domestic buildings have to state how they rate against the new Code for Sustainable Homes [see box page 20].

From 2010 they must meet at least level 3 of the code, and the mandatory minimum standard ratchets up over time to 2016’s level 6 – with zero net emissions.

But is it really going to happen? And if so – how?

Paul King, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council, is in no doubt that house builders are taking the target seriously. “What is incredibly positive,” he says, “is the fact that developers are anxious about how it will be delivered. Before December 2006 [when the target was announced] no one would have spent time worrying about how to deliver zero-carbon homes ten years down the road. There’s been an impressive amount of energy and resources poured into this.”

Martin Hunt, head of built environment at Forum for the Future, agrees that the industry is signed up to the principle of zero-carbon. “The big concern now is about financial, rather than technical, feasibility,” he says.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photos: English Partnerships; Ecos Homes

Red, white and green: Wimpey homes shape up at Oxley Woods

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Reality bites Ah yes… finance. Even before the housing slump, the extra costs involved were always going to be an issue in a competitive market. Now, with homebuyers as scarce as hens’ teeth, the building industry is in the doldrums, haemorrhaging workers, mothballing sites, and wondering if the good times will ever come again.

A cynic could well assume that in the struggle to stay afloat, developers would be keen to row back from demanding eco-targets. Yet the very day after Barratt Developments announced slump-affected annual results, its head of external affairs Dan Bridgett confirmed to Green Futures that work on its eco-flagship site at Hanham Hall was still scheduled to start in the new year – subject of course to final planning consents.

Hanham Hall is the first of ten sites to be developed as part of the Carbon Challenge competition launched by national regeneration agency English Partnerships (EP). The aim: to find out early on what it will take to deliver zero-carbon homes in large volumes. EP is making the brownfield sites from its land portfolio available to ‘preferred developers’, who can “use the competition as part of their R&D”, says EP’s Jayne Lomas. “They have to throw away their existing template and come up with something new from first principles.”

Some of the biggest names in the industry were attracted to bid for the sites, including Taylor Wimpey, Urban Splash, MJ Gleeson, and Crest Nicholson, as well as Barratt.

EP’s original stance was that projects had to ‘wash their own faces’ commercially. But between the award of the Hanham Hall deal to Barratt last December, and the decision this August on the second site, at Peterborough, the housing slump had changed the economic climate. Several potential bidders pulled out, unable to make a business case for such hefty investment in level 6 homes so far in advance of the 2016 deadline. It forced a change of tack. Eventually the land, valued at £6 million, was released for just £1 to the pPod consortium, headed by housing association Gentoo and regional house builder Morris Homes.

Additional land remediation costs will be met out of the public purse, while the Housing Corporation will guarantee £7 million in funding for social housing. As EP policy director Steve Carr told Building magazine: “This is now effectively a joint venture with the public sector. It looks like schemes with higher levels of sustainability are going to have to be more public-sector-led.”

Confirmation of this shift could come with the forthcoming EP decision on a third site, at the former Brodsworth colliery in Doncaster.

Photos: Denis Jones

Costing the earth?

This has a certain logic, given that a substantial proportion of the units on each development must come into the category of ‘affordable homes’. As Barratt’s Mike Clare puts it, “the challenge now is to ensure that zerocarbon is genuinely affordable”.

But just how much more will these ultra-green houses actually cost to build?

Consultants Cyril Sweett recently worked out costings for each stepped increase in the spec required to meet the Code. Some would say they are alarmist; certainly they sound alarming. Building to Code level 6 standards might cost half as much again as building to current regulations – an extra £37,800-£47,500 for a threebedroom detached house, and £20,000 just for a flat.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

The Barratt Green House

“ ”

The challenge now is to ensure that zero-carbon is genuinely affordable

hen it comes to rolling out zero-carbon building on large-scale, mainstream developments, Barratt is the frontrunner.

Last year its Green House design, a three-bedroom family home by architects Gaunt Francis, won the Homes of the Future competition in the Mail on Sunday’s British Homes Awards.

W

Key features include: • high thermal mass, thanks to ‘aircrete’ wall panels and pre-cast concrete floor slabs; • solar PV for electricity; space heating from an air source heat pump and hot water from solar panels; • rainwater harvesting linked to ‘grey water’ use for flushing toilets. Special provision for drying clothes at the top of the stairs using the rising currents of warm air; • window shutters which can close automatically to prevent over-heating in hot summer weather.

When the prototype went on show in the flesh at BRE’s Innovation Park in Watford this May, it was the first home ever built by a mainstream builder to achieve level 6 – and the company’s chief executive Mark Clare promised at the launch event to “take what works and apply it to house building across the country”.

200 times zero, as planned for Hanham Hall

Green Futures October 2008 19

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Feature

Decoding the Code for Sustainable Homes What does it do? It “communicates the overall sustainability performance of a new home”. Assessors licensed by BRE use some quite complex criteria to arrive at a Code rating on a scale from 1 to 6 (level 6 being ‘zero-carbon’). Since May 1 2008, a new build’s Home Information Pack must state how it measures up – either by showing its certified rating, or admitting it has not got one.

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What counts towards the rating? There are minimum standards for energy and water use at each Code level, and the opportunity to win further points for such things as the responsible use of materials, minimising waste and pollution, and promoting health and wellbeing (by providing a place to store bikes, for example).

How high is each level? Code level 1 requires 10% greater energy efficiency per square metre, and 20% greater water efficiency, than the existing building regs.

The average mains water requirement must drop further, to 80 litres per day per person, to achieve level 5.

Energy performance criteria rise to 25% greater efficiency for level 3, 44% for level 4 and 100% for level 5. That means providing as much zero-carbon energy in the course of the year as the dwelling itself uses for space heating, hot water and lighting. To get a level 6 rating, power used for appliances in the home must also be covered by renewable generation – and the home must also score at least 90% on the overall points system.

“ ”

The Code must be flexible on onsite renewables, not a clumsy blunt instrument

20 Green Futures October 2008

Onsite or out of sight?

So a big part of the answer lies in ensuring that the renewables element in the Code is a sufficiently flexible tool, rather than a clumsily blunt instrument. That means, for starters, not putting excessive emphasis on individual houses supporting their own microgeneration technologies. Solar PV, while technically effective, is still very hard to justify in terms of payback time – though there’s always the hope that a technological breakthrough could change that quite quickly. The one-off prototypes at BRE had no option but to do their microgen ‘on-house’ – but the Lighthouse, with its 46-square-metre carpet of PV, cost 40% more to build as a result.

High-rise, high-spec, low-carbon: One Brighton

Where does it apply? The Code does not cover Scotland, where the older EcoHomes ratings system is still used. Wales already has its own zero-carbon housing ambitions, with a 2011 target date, starting with publicly funded housing projects. Like England (and Northern Ireland), Wales now requires social housing to reach level 3 of the Code for Sustainable Homes, with effect from April 2008.

For a start, the fabric of the buildings must meet high standards – and be expertly installed – to make them airtight. Expensive triple glazing, rather than double, becomes de rigueur. Water saving systems can cost a few grand too. But by far the biggest bucks go on the kit to meet the renewable energy generation requirements.

Cyril Sweett’s report does predict, however, that these on-costs of getting to zero should come down by 25% by 2016. That might go some way towards meeting the Home Builders Federation’s plea that regulatory standards shouldn’t force builders to rely on as-yet-unaffordable technologies. There’s consolation, too, worth up to £15,000, in the government’s stamp duty exemption for zero-carbon homes bought before

Photos: Stewart Milne; Crest Nicholson/BioRegional Quintain

Rooftop wind power raises a question: scaling up makes better sense on a bigger site

Are these standards compulsory? Not yet. Strictly speaking, it is building regulations that set the compulsory minimum standards – and the government will raise these to the equivalent of Code level 3 in 2010, level 4 in 2013 and level 6 in 2016.

2012. And the initial capital outlay also needs to be seen in context of lower operating costs. In a level 6 home the energy bill might be £1,000 less than the current average (at today’s prices). The Lighthouse prototype [see box] came up with an annual cost of space and water heating as low as £30 a year – and nothing on electricity. Bearing in mind the likelihood that energy bills will be far higher in eight years’ time, and that starts to look like a really substantial saving.

All the same, if hefty extra costs for onsite renewables were passed on as price premiums, the market would need to be a great deal stronger before the volume builders could afford to put up many topspec new houses. Come 2016, of course, they couldn’t build anything else. But they’d have no business building what they couldn’t sell.

That’s clearly not what the government wants. The government wants 300,000 new homes a year. It also has stretch targets for increasing renewable energy. By increasing the proportion of houses generating their own power, the zero-carbon homes legislation can help drive that – but it won’t if it is crippled by unaffordability.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

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Top points for a prototype: Kingspan’s Lighthouse proves the case for solar-powered comfort – at a price

>

Lighthouse landmark

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n the race to meet the zero-carbon target, the Lighthouse is a real beacon. Unveiled in June 2007 at BRE’s Innovation Park, this was the first house ever to meet the top level 6 of the Code. Its hulking carapace, alongside its handful of near-zerocarbon neighbours, offered the first examples of how the future of housing might actually look.

Traditionalists may have got quite a shock. From the outside, the Lighthouse looks as if it is built from lollipop sticks. Inside, though, it is sleek and modern, with a deceptively airy feel. Dan Burr, associate partner at architects Sheppard Robson, says he really welcomed the challenge of designing homes for a zero-carbon future. “The Code for Sustainable Homes gives us, as designers, something new to get our teeth into, and a reason to innovate.”

The design team took some big decisions to meet the demanding zero-carbon brief. One of them was to go easy on the glass.

Windows, even when triple glazed, are a notorious weak spot when it comes to heat loss. So just 18% of the wall area inside the Lighthouse is glazed, rather than the industry standard of 25%.

To make the most of the light in the daytime living spaces, they turned convention upside down. The two bedrooms are on the ground floor, beneath an open-plan first floor with stairs leading to a galleried loft space. Exposed sweet chestnut beams vaulting high overhead reinforce the impression of light and space.

There’s a good reason, too, for the barn-like frame on the southfacing side of the house; it’s angled at 40˚ to maximise the energy produced by an array of solar panels. With a combined capacity of 4.7kW, these should generate enough electricity to match the

www.greenfutures.org.uk

residents’ requirements. In practice, during daylight hours (when the PV is working), the house will ‘export’ surplus power to the grid; after dark, it will rely on mains power.

An easy-to-read ‘dashboard’ will show how much energy is being produced – and used – at any one time. Winter warmth is provided by a wood pellet boiler. There’s solar water heating for when the boiler is turned off in summer, and rainwater harvesting to reduce the need (and the bill) for mains supplies.

Like all BRE’s prototypes, the Lighthouse uses so-called ‘modern methods of construction’, prefabricating the components offsite and delivering them in modules for assembly at their final resting place. It’s cheaper, and also allows far better quality control – especially vital to meet air tightness requirements for 2016 that will be ten times more rigorous than current building regulations.

As a prefabricated timber frame building, the Lighthouse has the positive attribute of low embodied energy. The downside to timber frame construction, however, is that it generally has low thermal mass.

Buildings made this way can quickly lose their heat – or their cool.

Katherine Holden of Arup, structural engineers for the project, explains how the Lighthouse overcomes these problems with some clever building technology. Panels in the ceilings between the floors, made of microscopic capsules, actually change from solid to liquid when exposed to heat. They soak up ambient heat during the day, and release it at night when the capsules turn solid again. This process is helped by the passive ventilation system on the roof, which captures cold air and pushes it deep into the heart of the house – but, in winter, can also recover 88% of any heat trying to escape.

Green Futures October 2008 21

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Feature Rethinking design – Ecos builds towards the light

Absolute zero?

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We have to upskill everyone, all the way from the design stage to handing the homes over to occupants

Roof-mounted wind turbines generally just aren’t good, or powerful, enough. As Mark Swan, director of Swan Country Homes and part of the Good Homes Alliance, says: “the embodied energy of manufacturing a small-scale windmill to stick on the roof far exceeds its [carbon] contribution”. But a community wind turbine linked to hundreds of homes – a possibility being considered for the Brodsworth site – may well make technical, economic and environmental sense.

Combined heat and power (CHP) schemes fired by biomass can also be much more cost-efficient at a community level. Hanham Hall is expected to take the biomass CHP route, while pPod’s development in Peterborough could use an anaerobic digester to fuel its own CHP solution. But Hanham Hall is at the lower end of the scale at which CHP systems work best, and most housing developments in Britain are nowhere near that big. Half of all new homes are in developments of fewer than 50. One in three, indeed, are in clusters of fewer than ten – where the renewables needed for Code level 6 would cost twice as much per home as in larger schemes, according to the government’s Renewables Advisory Board.

The power on top takes the Sigma House to level 5

All of which raises questions as to whether the government has set an impossible goal. At the Home Builders Federation, spokesman Steve Turner insists the 2016 target is “by no means unachievable” – and that nobody is saying it should be scrapped. It does not sound quite so unequivocal, however, when he says: “We are committed, but it needs to be balanced against other objectives” – such as affordable homes, and three million new homes by 2020. The precise government definition of ‘zero-carbon’ for Code levels 5 and 6 is critical, says Turner.

This is currently under review, and insiders report signs that the government is indeed showing signs of flexibility. This would mark a shift from its rigid view of a year ago, when the then housing minister, Yvette Cooper, insisted: “Offsite renewable energy sources… will not be eligible unless directly connected to the development concerned.” A ‘near-site’ generator such as a community wind turbine, in other words, would have to feed the site by ‘private wire’ rather than via the grid – and there would be no wriggle room for offsetting, or bringing in green energy from further afield.

Purist this might have been, but was it workable?

No, said the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) task force. Its May 2008 report, The Definition of Zero Carbon, concludes bluntly that it is “not achievable on up to 80% of new homes”. If we want three million new homes by 2020 without watering down the level of carbon savings, it says, the definition of zero-carbon must change.

This, says Paul King, means recognising that “offsite renewables could play a part, [along with] communityscale technologies” [such as wind and CHP]. This would have the added benefit of achieving much-needed carbon reductions in the existing housing stock, “by enabling the distribution of low- or zero-carbon heat through district networks.”

The Council suggests setting a minimum target for renewable generation onsite (or ‘near-site’ with a dedicated connection). Thereafter, however, it should be OK to match it against power delivered into the grid from a genuinely additional green source built somewhere else. Alternatively – in what would amount to a kind of offset scheme – a developer could pay into a ‘community energy fund’ to promote enough new renewable generation to deliver at least equal (and ideally greater) net carbon savings.

Simon McWhirter, manager of WWF-UK’s One Planet Homes campaign and a member of the UKGBC task force, believes that this is “a definition which is robust in an environmental sense, workable, and has broad support”. If the government consultation follows similar lines, he is optimistic about what will emerge early next year.

It isn’t just energy which needs renewing, but skills, too.

Stewart Dalgarno, head of product development at Stewart Milne Timber Systems, is confident about getting the mass production technology right to churn out airtight building shells, but he’s only too aware how easy it is for unwary plumbers to knock holes in them. “We have to upskill everyone, all the way from the design stage to handing the homes over [to occupants],” he says. Drawing on its experience with the Sigma House prototype, the company has produced a staff manual on

22 Green Futures October 2008

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Photos: Ecos Homes; Peter White/BRE

Bridging the skills gap

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low- and zero-carbon building – and it wants to go further still and establish a skills academy.

The Academy for Sustainable Communities has flagged up this same issue, warning of a serious and growing skills gap. Can the industry produce enough trained people in time to build to zero-carbon standards?

According to a recent review of how the UK’s top 20 home builders are doing on sustainability, good intentions are not yet translating into evidence on the ground. We were already falling behind in 2004, when 60% of new homes in a BRE survey failed to meet energy efficiency targets in the current building regulations, and the learning curve gets steeper as the regulatory standards rise. Paul King at the UKGBC knows this is another area where public policy faces a real challenge. The 2016 zero-carbon deadline is “tough but credible”, he says, but the government must show it is serious about reaching it, by pouring resources into solving the issues of planning, skills,

“

Kick-starting the housing industry on a zero-carbon path has been the government’s most decisive step to address overall emissions

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and energy supply that threaten to blow it off course.

Whatever the precise target, it’s widely agreed that kick-starting the housing industry on a zero-carbon path has been the most decisive step the government has yet taken to address the need for deep cuts in our overall emissions. The essential 80% reduction in these, insists McWhirter, is less hard to achieve in the housing sector than in areas such as transport and food. Moreover, as he points out, the 2016 target doesn’t mean we need to be building level 6 houses in large quantities before about 2013. What we do need is to put plans in place to do so. “Most or all developers can already build to level 3,” he says. What they need now is clarity about the next big stretch.

Terry Slavin is a regular contributor on energy and environmental issues for The Guardian and Green Futures. Roger East is editor of Green Futures.

> Niche providers

Photo: Tom Russell Architects; Crest Nicholson/BioRegional Quintain

Until the government announced its 2016 target, a few specialist developers had been ploughing something of a lonely furrow on sustainable homes, building to the ‘excellent’ and ‘very good’ levels of the old EcoHomes standard. Now their small scale may put them at a disadvantage when it comes to ticking all the boxes for the top levels of the new Code. Yet they are still important players, well attuned to the less technical, more ‘lifestyle’ aspects of sustainability that their customers seek.

Charles Couzens of Ecos Homes, whose 12 homes at Great Bow Yard in Somerset won the 2006 Daily Telegraph/What Homes Gold Award for most sustainable development in the country, says that this would now only reach level 2 on the new code – evidence of the scale of the government’s ambition. But standards are rising. Ten miles away is the company’s new five-home Old Apple Store development in the village of Stawell. Already being sold off plan and expected to be completed this year, these homes will probably meet code level

5 – putting them in the top 1% of most sustainable homes built in the UK to date. Couzens’s co-director Lucy Durnan believes there’s no shortage of demand in this specialist market, so she’s confident about four more developments in the pipeline. The ‘niche’ is not just in pretty West Country villages, either – her confidence is mirrored in Middlesbrough, seemingly worlds away, by the enterprising team at Bioregional Quintain [see below].

The main emphasis of renewable technology at Stawell is on water and space heating – with a wood pellet boiler in each house and solar water heating panels on the roof. Electricity generation, however, remains a thorny issue, with every square metre of PV adding to the price premium. “It’s difficult where you are doing small developments,” said Couzens. “I don’t think anyone expects small developers to get to level 6.” Not at the moment, perhaps – but they’ll have to in eight years’ time. By that time the definition of a zero-carbon home should be more flexible.

BioRegional Quintain’s vision for the regeneration of Middlehaven Docks in Middlesbrough aims to make sustainable living “attractive, affordable and fun”. Helen Devy, head of residential sales and marketing, says the RiversideOne development is “on track in terms of exchanged plots, with a steady stream of visitors to our marketing suite and website who are interested in purchasing”.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

A contrasting vision of low-carbon living by the waterside.

This one – complete with dog – is designed by Tom Russell Architects, using local materials to blend sympathetically into the Pembrokeshire village of Lawrenny.

Green Futures October 2008 23

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A thousand words

graceful tall ship glides past the wind turbines at Burbo Bank – watched by the iron men of Antony Gormley’s Another Place.

Wind propulsion was ousted by steam in the 19th century, but may now be ripe for a comeback. Huge computer-controlled kites can help tow modern cargo ships, cutting their dirty fuel consumption by up to a third.

A

© Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

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Feature

The

futureproofers A “

round the country, towns

It’s a rallying call: ‘From oil dependency to local resilience’

” Rob Hopkins: “credit crunch is opportunity”

26 Green Futures October 2008

are printing their own currency, turning over scraps of land to grow food and reskilling their workforce for a future where fossil fuels are no longer on tap. When the Transition Town movement first got under way it may have sounded a little militant: “from oil dependency to local resilience”. But with 85 communities on board, 700 more looking to join, and ‘peak oil’ in the news, is this an idea whose time has come?

It began three years ago, when permaculture teacher Rob Hopkins developed an Energy Descent Action Plan to prepare the Irish town of Kinsale for a post-oil future.

Since then he has expanded the concept into a 12-step Transition Handbook, which advises community leaders both on mitigating climate change and adapting to a world where fossil fuels are no longer so cheap or abundant.

He believes the current economic climate only serves to reinforce the message. “Together, the credit crunch, peak oil and climate change could become the breeding ground for ugly political discourse,” he says. “What we need to do is help people see that they present an opportunity for change rather than a challenge.”

All well and good in theory, but in practice can Transition Towns bring about radical change, or are they yet another case of middle class do-gooders tinkering around the edges? You will of course find the ubiquitous canvas bags in there – ‘Porty Shoppers’ they’re known

as in the Portobello district of Edinburgh, one of the places campaigning to stamp out plastic bags. And Transition Bristol’s session on ‘emotional composting’ (turning negative to positive energy) is a fairly liberal interpretation of the transition brief. But some of the thinking and debates are pretty far reaching. In Ashburton, Devon, they’ve set out a time line that starts with simple plans to open the library more often, and ends with a vision of giving over most of the land around the town to food and medicine by 2015.

Ten miles down the road in Totnes, the country’s first Transition Town, they’re aiming to bolster local trade by introducing their own currency, the Totnes Pound.

Designed to be spent in local businesses, it has the same cash value as a pound sterling and is legally backed by an equivalent in official currency, so traders and customers are confident the notes have a real value.

After an initial print run of 300, there are now 7,500 in circulation and some pretty hefty transactions have taken place; one optician accepted a £200 payment in full for a pair of glasses. If the New Economics Foundation is right that every £1 spent in an area is worth £1.76 to the local economy, Totnes Pounds are preventing a fair bit of economic ‘leakage’ – give or take the few notes that Hopkins discovered for sale on eBay as collectors’ items.

Beyond the safe havens of the market towns that feature heavily in the network, could the model ever be rolled out in big urban environments, where you might not

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Photos: Clare Richardson; Mike Grenville; Janine Wiedel/Alamy

On a rooftop in Brixton, a back garden in Totnes, a village hall in Ambridge, they’re preparing for a post-oil future. So are Transition Towns busting out of the eco-niche and into the mainstream?

Photos: Ermiyas Mekonnen; John Williams; Noel Longhurst; Mike Grenville

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find the same community spirit? Hopkins concedes that “the first wave of places were the ones you’d expect”.

“Laboratories”, he calls them, “where ideas get tested”.

But he adds that all kinds of communities are now involved – Leicester, Coventry, South Liverpool… “It’s a whole new challenge to see if the idea translates to the city scale,” he says. The network is planning a conference to discuss the issue in November, but his hunch is that the way to tap into cities is to break them down into ‘villages’ – such as Brixton, the first London borough to sign up.

With an ethnically diverse and highly transient population, it could hardly be more removed from Devon, yet the group is planning to introduce its equivalent of the Totnes Pound, the ‘Brixton Brick’, which takes its name from the borough’s much older LETS scheme. The team is also getting urban vegetable growing off the ground – quite literally; rooftops as well as estates are on the list of possible scraps of land for the ABUNDANCE Project (aka Activating Barren Urban Niches for Daring Agricultural Networks of Creativity and Endeavour).

If names like these sound very new age, Transition Towns Brixton’s involvement with Lambeth Council proves they’re nothing of the sort. It was their input into a long-term development plan for the borough which pushed the council to commit to implementing zerocarbon technologies wherever possible, according to volunteer Duncan Law. “Before we got involved, adapting to a low-energy future didn’t figure anywhere in the plan,” he says. “But after we sat down with the council, we helped them see that the coming energy crisis could be an opportunity for them to lead on lowenergy solutions.”

The Transition network has had a handful of coups at the local political level: an inspired city councillor who persuaded his peers to pass a resolution recognising the problem of peak oil and supporting Edinburgh’s burgeoning Transition movement; the Transition Forest of Dean invited by the regional development agency to work together with the Local Strategic Partnership… It’s exactly what was intended in step number 9: “Build a bridge to local government”. Hopkins believes the model could even be extended to create ‘Transition Local Authorities’. “We’re often contacted by them, saying ‘how can we make this a Transition area?’ and so far we’ve have to explain that the push comes from the community.” Over the coming year, the network will be looking at expanding to include universities and businesses as well.

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“ ”

The challenge is to see if the idea translates to the city scale

Snapshots in Transition: Local food in Stroud; one community’s energy descent plan; the movement’s critical mass; digging for victory in London; brainstorming the future; building with bales in Westcliffe; spending Totnes pounds; Brixton takes to the streets

Hopkins talks proudly of the first Transition ‘training for trainers’, which is creating a growing pyramid of evangelists. Regional groups are also self-seeding around the country, keeping in line with the idea that leaders in the movement should “Let it go where it wants to go”.

He emphasises that there are no fixed ideas about how the network should work: “It’s an active learning process – and everyone involved is contributing.”

It’s encouraging to hear the concept mentioned on The Archers, in Clare Short’s speeches, and plugged by Jonathon Porritt, Forum for the Future’s founder director, who says it’s “one of the most positive things going on out there today – and already playing an important role in transforming both people’s attitudes and behaviour”. But what would success look like? When pushed to lay his cards on the table, Hopkins comes up with three criteria: a visible influence on the political system; reduced carbon; and increased resilience. Translated into real life, that could mean localisation enshrined at the heart of policy-making in five or ten years’ time. Or, in 2020, being on track to hit the government’s target of reducing emissions by a third. Or even a scenario in which it’s too expensive for supermarkets to stock their shelves with imported goods, but a strong regional infrastructure helps fill the gaps with local produce.

Those within the movement aren’t keen to predict how it will look over the next decade or so. There’s a general recognition that they’re entering new territory, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and collectively finding a way forward. James Samuel, a Transition activist on Waiheke Island, New Zealand, puts it nicely: “It may be that Transition Towns are like the first weeds that push up through the concrete, opening a crack for something much bigger to follow through in its wake.”

– Vicki Lesley and Hannah Bullock

Where, what, how > 85 communities in the UK, Australasia and North America > preparing for climate change and peak oil > through activities like food growing and local trade > by building alliances with local government

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Feature

Zero hour for a new capitalism Jonathon Porritt looks behind the smoke of destruction for a more sustainable model, rising from the toxic ashes of bad debts and ravaged environments.

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“ ”

There’s nothing too complicated about this. It can be done. It has to be done. All it lacks is political will

28 Green Futures October 2008

ack Welch, formerly of GE,

is the most celebrated chief executive of the last 30 years. It’s his variety of capitalism that is now dying in front of our eyes. Aggressive and ruthless, he was known to friend and foe alike as ‘Neutron Jack’ for his ability to hollow out companies by sacking a quota of employees every year (‘pour encourager les autres’) whilst keeping the business itself intact.

He was also an environmental despoiler on a heroic scale. It’s not the legacy he himself lays claim to in his self-aggrandising autobiography, but he will be known for decades to come for his part in laying waste to the Hudson River near New York – through the calculated, persistent release of PCBs (one of those pollutants that accumulate in our bodies) – to help reduce costs and maximise profits. After years of delaying tactics, a clean up of sorts is now under way – and GE’s current shareholders will see billions of dollars from their should-be dividends deployed to pay for it.

Neutron Jack was decommissioned in 2001, but if you fast-forward seven years you’ll see his like in the erstwhile ‘masters of the universe’ who caused the latest sudden and disastrous implosion of the financial system. Their legacy is, of course, a very different one: packages of toxic debt released with criminal irresponsibility into the US sub-prime market, just as Jack Welch released his barrels of PCBs into the Hudson River. A clean up, of sorts, will soon be under way.

Just in case your fears about looming recession have temporarily blinded you to other concerns, it may be timely to point out that the accelerating build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, let alone the unceasing war we wage on the natural world, will be only marginally slowed by any downturn in the global economy. Given half a chance, a new cohort of equally macho chief executives will no doubt see it as their historic duty to undo the damage done, by setting out to do more damage of exactly the same kind.

In all the coverage of the market meltdown, I have seen few, if any, connections made between these toxic time bombs – financial and ecological. You might think they were totally separate phenomena. In fact, they are

both products of the same kind of limits-defying, costexternalising, profit-maximising capitalism that has dominated people’s lives for the last three decades.

A global economy built on debt-driven consumption and the liquidation of the natural capital assets on which all our lives still depend, was guaranteed to self-destruct.

It was only a question of when. Now we know.

So let’s stop skimming over the surface and look instead at fundamental causation. When federal reserve chairman and treasury secretary Paulson and Bernanke presented their ‘rescue package’ to Congress back in September, the problem was characterised purely in terms of the hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage loans to sub-prime borrowers in the US housing market, then bundled up into collateralised debt obligations and traded between banks in a web of increasingly opaque transactions. When the US housing bubble burst, these ‘toxic derivatives’ spread their poison throughout the entire system.

But the whole credit crunch is just a symptom of a much more pernicious problem: the wholesale deregulation of financial capital markets back in the 1980s, and the lifting of controls over the amount of credit that banks can create. It amazes me how few people understand the massive con-trick that still lies at the heart of today’s financial system: the right granted to banks to conjure up credit more or less out of thin air – and then charge people interest on it.

Emergency rescue packages, such as the controversial Paulson and Bernanke plan, are a painful but necessary starting point. But no solutions package is likely to have any lasting impact unless it includes an end to the structural inequities of credit creation.

One person’s credit is another’s unmanageable debt. Indeed, indebtedness – in the shape of personal debt, corporate debt, farm debt, national debt and so on – is the single most important feature of today’s model of economic growth. To keep alive the illusion of prosperity, politicians of every persuasion have not just condoned the taking on of debt as sound economic practice, but have actively promoted it. And their electorates have dutifully gone out there and consumed on the back of those debts as if there would be no tomorrow and no final reckoning.

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Photos: Getty/Hiroya Minakuchi; REUTERS/Caetano Barreira

Capital shift: from toxic trading…

As our debts to the banks and others have built up, so have our debts to nature – in terms of the totally unsustainable depletion of natural resources, measured by the loss of topsoil, forests, fresh water and biodiversity.

Everybody knows that liquidating capital assets to fuel current consumption is crazy, but nobody seems to know how to stop it. In the interests of economic growth, cost externalisation (as with Jack Welch’s wilful destruction of the Hudson River) is either officially licensed or very inadequately regulated.

Politicians may laud the work of economists like Nick Stern, who famously characterised climate change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen”.

But when it comes to eliminating that market failure – internalising costs by putting a proper price on CO2 and other greenhouse gases – their pro-market zeal deserts them in round after round of mutual blame-laying.

Our account with nature is now so overdrawn on so many fronts that many people believe it cannot be repaid.

I still think that is a counsel of despair. Just as the world’s banks are now rushing to detoxify their portfolios and to rebuild their balance sheets (in part – and with no apparent sense of irony – through massive infusions of petrodollars earned from cooking the planet via the Sovereign Wealth Fund of the Middle East!), so the world’s governments must now hasten to rebuild the balance sheet of nature.

There’s nothing too complicated about this. We know how to protect stocks of disappearing natural capital: look at the success of ‘no-fish zones’ as a way of restoring depleted fisheries. We’re getting more creative about incentivising ‘asset protection schemes’, such as those aimed at rewarding countries for keeping their forests intact. We know how to drive out waste and promote massive improvements in resource efficiency. We know it’s possible to replace climate-threatening fossil fuels with benign, increasingly effective sources of renewable energy – and to make money out of it, too: global investments in cleantech in 2007 soared to more than $140 billion.

As a telling sign of the times, when Jeff Immelt took over at GE, one of his first acts was to set up a new business called Ecomagination to funnel huge new investments into renewable energy, desalination, waste and water management technologies and so on. He’ll still

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…to asset protection

“

The collapse of the world’s banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena

”

have to deal with the death of the Hudson River, but GE’s new balance sheet looks a lot smarter than Jack Welch’s.

All this can be done. And has to be done. The missing ingredient is political will. Prevailing mindsets are still warped by the belief that such a strategy will be too costly, and that electorates won’t buy it.

I wonder. If vast amounts of US taxpayers’ money can be conjured up to rectify the greed-errors of yesterday’s self-styled financial Titans, would it be so difficult to find a fraction of that to pump-prime the ‘green industrial revolution’ that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been banging on about for so long?

The collapse of the world’s banking system and the impending disaster of accelerating climate change are not separate phenomena. They are simply the most visible symptoms of a particular model of capitalism that will bring human civilisation to its knees. But those symptoms will not get sorted unless and until we commit to a radical transformation of the way we create and distribute wealth in the world today.

Jonathon Porritt is a programme director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. His book, ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’, is available from www.earthscan.co.uk, 020 7841 1930.

A Green New Deal Even if mainstream politicians can’t get their heads around dealing simultaneously with the credit crunch and the climate crunch, new ideas are pouring out from the NGOs. The most ambitious of these is A Green New Deal, put together by the New Economics Foundation and other groups to demonstrate how a 21st-century equivalent of President Roosevelt’s New Deal could mobilise a ‘Carbon Army’ to sort out energy efficiency in our homes and massively accelerate investment in lowcarbon technologies. www.neweconomics.org

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Partner viewpoint

Plane sensible Don’t shun the aviation industry, argues Entec’s Louise Pritchard: help the sector get to grips with its carbon issues.

F

lying has, to say the least,

an image problem. Aviation has become an easy target for environmentalists. Plane Stupid activists scaled Parliament in February, to protest against a third runway. Climate Camp set up shop just outside Heathrow last year. Even mainstream greens have called into question the whole point of offsetting flights.

You’d think this would be enough to scare off an environmental consultancy from working with the industry. But Entec is helping both airlines and airports in the UK to reduce their impact as well as improve their image. “We discovered there was an appetite and they’re very keen to do their bit,” says Entec senior consultant Louise Pritchard, who recently held a series of seminars for the industry to determine the way forward. “We’re trying to help them understand what they can do and how best to respond.”

Part of the problem, she explains, is that aviation finds itself in a double bind. It is being taxed – via passengers, if not fuel – to undo environmental damage, and it should also be included in the European Emission Trading Scheme by 2012 (pending an EU decision) –

30 Green Futures October 2008

but it is still seen as the arch villain on climate change. Entec’s recommendation is to take a holistic approach, where carbon emissions are tackled through energy management as well as offsetting and trading. What’s essential, Pritchard says, is clear visibility and dialogue with pressure groups.

For an example of this in action, she points to the environmental labelling scheme that Entec worked on with the budget airline FlyBe. “It’s similar to those you’d get on fridges and washing machines, to show how their aircraft perform across a range of measures. It includes the global impacts through carbon dioxide emissions, but also the impacts around the airport, through local air quality and noise.

The idea is to look more broadly than just climate change.”

While not actually reducing emissions, this initiative – the first of its kind in the aviation industry – was praised by the House of Commons Transport Select Committee, which encouraged all airlines to follow suit. Despite its positioning on FlyBe’s website, Entec doubts that it would influence a mainstream consumer choosing their flight – because they need to get from A to B on whichever of

FlyBe’s planes fly that route. What it does do, says Pritchard, is help the consumer understand the impact of their flight – and, more importantly, it also encourages the airline to keep choosing planes with lower environmental impacts.

Pritchard thinks the aviation industry is being given a rough ride in comparison with other transport sectors. While the rise of short breaks has helped paint a picture of flying as an unnecessary ‘luxury’, she says, aviation is only a relatively small contributor to CO2 emissions – about half that of shipping worldwide, for instance. At the UK level, 23% of carbon dioxide emissions come from domestic transport, of which only 1.6% is from domestic flights – although international flights from the UK do bring that figure up to 6.4%.

The much-discussed additional radiative forcing effect of emissions at altitude complicates this picture, of course, but planes are not alone in having other non-CO2 effects on climate change.

Entec is also educating airports on how best to respond to the opponents of expansion. “One of the confusions surrounding expansion is that people don’t twig that the increase in emissions is down to the airlines, rather than the airport,” says Pritchard. “But they are covered separately in emissions trading. So we’re looking at what the airport can do, how it can influence its airlines, and its passengers – by encouraging them to use public transport and minimising car drop-offs and waits.” The consultancy is giving airports advice on everything from greener design, incorporating renewables and better energy management, to how to play up the positives, such as the economic contribution that their infrastructure makes.

Entec makes no bones about it: we won’t see air travel reducing significantly in the near future – and let’s face it, many of us find it hard to kick the flying habit entirely. Instead, it believes global carbon management schemes are the best way to reduce the industry’s impact – as well as improve its image. – Iain Aitch

Entec UK is a Forum for the Future partner. www.entecuk.com

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Photo: Lars Lindblad/Shutterstock

Aircraft with less impact?

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Comment

American Eye Fired up over climate change, US students are turning up the heat on colleges’ green credentials.

Polly Ghazi looks forward to a race for the top.

F

irst the bad news:

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I don’t think we’ve seen activism this strong since apartheid

Eco points on campus

Illustration: Andrew Baker

The Princeton Review’s green rating covers: • renewable energy use • recycling • local and organic food • green building • transport • emission reduction plans and goals • professional sustainability management • scope for student engagement • environmental studies courses • environmental literacy requirement.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

spending on ‘back-to-college’ gear in the US this autumn will hit $600 per student, in one of America’s biggest annual binges of conspicuous consumption.

Now the good: America’s future leaders are increasingly seeking universities with good green credentials.

When the Princeton Review did a survey of 10,300 university applicants earlier this year no less than 63% said they would factor information on a college’s environmental commitment into their decision [see GF68, pp30-31 for a similar survey in the UK]. Wasting no time in tapping into this trend, the Princeton Review’s editors added a new environmental rating to its hugely popular annual guide The Best 368 Colleges, published in August.

Alongside more traditional rankings – best professors, best dorms, tastiest food, most beautiful grounds – this rates America’s top colleges and universities on a ‘green campus’ scale of 60 to 99 [see right].

The green rating, developed with non-profit marketing agency ecoAmerica, asks ten questions about institutional commitment to sustainability, covering campus environmental management, facilities and quality of life as well as “how well the institution is preparing students for employment and citizenship in a world defined by environmental challenges”.

Eleven institutions score a perfect 99 in the 2008 guide, ranging from wealthy, trendsetting Harvard and Yale to smaller, under the radar colleges including the universities of New Hampshire, Oregon and Washington.

Arizona State University, home to the largest system of windmills and solar panels of any US campus, is another in the top bracket, as is the tiny College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbour, Maine, which specialises in ecology and was the first US college to become carbon neutral.

These forward-thinking colleges are in the vanguard of a nationwide race to respond to student demand for green campuses, fuelled by spiraling concern about climate change among American youth. “I don’t think we’ve seen [student] activism this strong since apartheid,” Cheryl Miller, vice president of Sightlines, a data research company that helps higher education institutions compare their environmental practices, recently told the New York Times.

In response, colleges are setting tough targets for achieving carbon neutrality, hiring sustainability coordinators, and helping to drive a nationwide boom in purchases of wind and solar energy systems. And they are co-ordinating as well as competing. In the past two years, 550 institutions representing about 30% of American students have signed up to the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment.

This binds them to inventory their greenhouse gas emissions within a year, and within two to produce a plan and target date to reach zero net CO2 emissions. They must also implement at least two of seven concrete measures; choices include buying 15% of their energy from renewable sources and constructing new buildings to the US Green Building Council’s ecodesign standards.

Robert Franek, the Princeton Review’s publisher, sees major progress in recent years in colleges implementing a comprehensive and holistic sustainability agenda – rather than just picking off the easier stuff like recycling or tree planting, or focusing more on green PR than substance.

“The green movement on college campuses is now far more than an Earth Day recycling project or a dining hall menu of organic food,” he declares on the Review’s website. “The commitment that many colleges and their student bodies have made to environmental issues… in their practices, use of resources, and academic and research programs is truly compelling.”

If any more proof were needed that a major lifestyle movement is under way, the mass-market retailers are providing it. Vying for that $600 per student back-tocollege budget, Wal-Mart, Target and their more upmarket rivals are all displaying new green merchandise. The eco-sensitive undergraduate can pick up pencils and photo frames made from recycled newspaper at Target, shoe bags fashioned from recyclable bottles at the Container Store and renewable bamboo clothes racks and hemp pillows at Crate and Barrel. Wal-Mart even has the answer for late night essay writers craving that caffeine boost: a $10 four-cup coffee maker, engineered to reduce energy use and complete with biodegradable packaging.

Polly Ghazi is US correspondent for Green Futures and writer/editor for the World Resources Institute.

Princeton Review, www.princetonreview.com

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Feature

T1

10.35am

Weds

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“It’s New Year’s Day, 2030, and the sulphur-planes are spraying the solid blue sky…”

01.01.2030 www.greenfutures.org.uk

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The future, as they say, starts here: as climate change kicks in, the decisions we make today will resonate 20 years on.

James Goodman unveils a new Forum for the Future project mapping out possible scenarios for a world wrestling with a new climate – in every sense.

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t’s New Year’s Day, 2030.

Hungover, you stumble across to the fridge which, sensing your intention, slides open, and you pull out a packet of pig-free bacon – the stuff that’s artificially grown in vats. You look absentmindedly for the eat-by date before remembering that, with today’s preservation technology, it lasts forever. The kitchen is awash with smart technology, all running on a tiny amount of energy, most of which comes from the solar paint on the roof. You look out of the window (which imperceptibly adjusts its tint to deflect glare). It’s another warm, sunny day, and by chance you spot a sulphur-plane passing over the slums in the distance. It’s almost invisible, but the craft is emitting a fine spray that helps keep the planet from boiling over. Still holding the bacon, you turn to the oven and ask it what else you want for breakfast.

A

lternatively…

It’s New Year’s Day, 2030.

Hungover, you stumble across to the fridge and yank it open.

You grab the purple nutrition bar you’ve been saving, slump down on the sofa and call up the movie channel. Just a couple of minutes’ viewing proves it’s another propaganda film, featuring the valiant efforts of the ‘global volunteers’ in Antarctica who are helping to run the refugee settlements. But viewing is interrupted quickly by your Monitor, which announces that you left the fridge door open and are wasting too much energy. The broadcast is closed down and you’re docked several credits for the climate violation. Much more like that and you’ll be heading for the refugee settlements yourself.

T

hen again, it could be…

New Year’s Day, 2030. Hungover, you stumble across to the fridge and pull it open. Inside, almost everything is red, white and blue. As you grab a carton of English orange juice, you laugh to yourself about how, way back, local sourcing was so middle-class-aspirational. Now it’s almost impossible to get anything from outside the UK – and quite right, too. We can feed ourselves, thank you very much. You switch on the box and call up the King’s Speech you missed on Christmas Day because you were on duty. It’s inspiring stuff about pulling together as a nation. He still looks pretty youthful and vigorous in his Home Defence uniform. As you stand listening respectfully, you notice through the window defence patrol jets streaking across the solid blue sky.

Three versions of a possible future – each the result of decisions we start taking tomorrow. They may sound far-fetched, but in a world where global weather patterns are shifting almost as fast as the markets, we’d be unwise to plan for things staying the same. >

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Feature

economic growth for environmental gain, but to maintain the world’s drive for development through growth.

Processes and products began to achieve startling efficiency gains, all in the name of profit. Super-computers took system design to a new level of sophistication – and even took over a range of decision-making and strategy-setting tasks. Cars went electric – and two-car families became more common around the globe.

Energy generation was massive and bold: huge nuclear reactors sprang up, concentrated solar arrays covered mile after mile of north African desert, and a new generation of computer-controlled clean coal power stations piped their exhaust straight into empty gas fields. Striking new geo-engineering projects sucked carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and deflected sunlight to reduce global warming.

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Solar arrays cover mile after mile of the Sahara

Worlds away So, what might take us to one or other of those very different mornings?

Our opening scenario, Efficiency First, is a world in which market mechanisms have been redesigned to value carbon at exactly the right level to unleash a storm of low-carbon, high-tech innovation. It all began in the 2010s when, faced with increasingly gloomy scientific projections of climate impact, the EU pushed hard for more draconian measures – only to find itself outflanked

by India and China. They were unwilling to sacrifice economic prosperity “to solve the West’s problem”.

But as it became clear that climate change posed a major threat to their own people, they brokered a new agreement: one based firmly on incentives and markets – not caps and restrictions. In this they had the enthusiastic support of the US which, with its vast renewable resources, saw a low-carbon future as an opportunity to rebuild its shattered economy. Together, they shared a resolute determination not to sacrifice

34 Green Futures October 2008

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The Carbon Monitor keeps your watts under surveillance

Growth in carbon dioxide emissions flatlined in 2020 and began to fall slowly. When the news broke, there were celebrations all around the world. Yes, the effects of climate change were still being felt, and from Bangladesh to Florida the world’s poor were still suffering. But the impetus to ‘grow the solution to climate change’ gained ever more momentum, despite misgivings in some quarters about the ‘ethics-free’ economy it had created. In 2030, global warming is starting to feel like yesterday’s problem. Now countries debate the merits of returning the world to preindustrial levels of greenhouse gas concentrations.

Too good to be true? Perhaps – but there are some serious downsides to Efficiency First. A drive for growth at all costs has widened the gap between rich and poor, and prompted growing social conflict.

Meanwhile, nature is in headlong retreat. Ecosystems everywhere need close management or risk collapse.

Wilderness is all but vanished from the planet, and natural resources are in short supply. The world is in

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Photos: Mick Roessler/Corbis; Wattson

They are among a range of scenarios emerging from expert opinion and analysis canvassed as part of Climate Futures [see box, opposite] – a joint venture between Forum for the Future and HP Labs. The aim: to provoke fresh thinking over the likely consequences of global warming itself – and of the varying strategies we might choose to tame (or adapt to) it. It’s far from an academic exercise. The way we tackle climate change won’t just shape the weather of the future; it will change everything from the way we do business to the way we are governed.

The years to come will be defined as much by climate change as the 1930s were by depression or the 1950s by the Cold War. It will be everywhere in decisions and discussions, whether we are on the way to solving it – or not. We should, in short, plan for a climate-changed world, and not just climate change.

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It’s a world where governments have turned their back on burdensome treaty obligations, and poured resources into protecting themselves from the consequences of climate change running rampant. They’ve effectively pulled up the drawbridge: raising trade barriers and even going to war to secure water and food supplies. Climate mitigation is cast aside in favour of a flurry of selfish adaptation measures, producing a ‘tragedy of the commons’ of gigantic proportions. By 2030, world trade has shrunk dramatically; the UN is on the point of collapse and globalised civilisation as we know it today is facing a very uncertain future.

This is a world that nobody wants and many fear.

Even greater, then, is the need to understand what might lead us down this road – and do whatever possible to avoid it.

a deadly race to develop new technologies, materials and processes before the whole house of cards collapses.

By contrast, another set of predictions leads to the Environmental War Economy world. This is a world that woke up late to climate change. It’s one where governments fought shy of a global agreement until 2017, by which time the accumulated evidence of catastrophic shifts in weather patterns meant they saw no choice but to take draconian action. Out went the soft talk of incentives and persuasion; in came hard policy and tough regulation. As time went on, the state took a stronger and stronger role, rationalising whole industry sectors to reduce their climate change impacts, and even putting Carbon Monitors in people’s homes to watch their energy

Future method

“ ”

Photos: Jim Batty/Alamy

Even the food flies the flag

use. And so in 2030, greenhouse gas emissions are at last beginning to decline dramatically – but the cost to individual liberty – and that of business, too – has been severe.

Such a vision might seem alarmist – but some of our climate futures experts saw elements of it, at least, as inevitable. According to this view, we currently have a window of opportunity – perhaps for just a few more years – to use markets to combat climate change. Miss that window and we’ll be forced into more immediate, sweeping measures.

For business, it will become a question of complying, or facing the consequences.

Both these worlds assume that there is some sort of global consensus for action, sooner or later. Given the snail’s pace of progress so far, that can’t be taken for granted. Which might leave us living in our third scenario: Protectionist World. This suggests what could happen if national interests start to take priority over any global drive to mitigate climate change.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

The Climate Futures project is rooted firmly in the latest science of climate change, and draws on research about the political and behavioural responses to it. We also consulted experts and practitioners from around the world, canvassing views on the means to overcome climate change, the likelihood of their success and the uncertainties and dependencies around them.

We found a wide variety of expectations for the future, ranging from techno-optimism to a gloomy certainty of collapse. We picked apart the conversations we had and isolated the driving factors for change that are likely to shape the future.

We used a futures methodology to take us from 2008 to 2012, an important year politically for climate change, then 2020 and finally 2030. The possible futures diverged over time: so there were two sorts of world we thought possible in 2012 – one in which a global agreement on climate change had been reached, and one that was regionalised, with perhaps Europe and the US having bought into one agreement and China into another. From there, possibilities began to diverge radically, and by 2030 we had developed nine different worlds that we thought were possible.

We chose five to work up in more detail, on the basis that they demonstrated enough strategic differences to flag up longerterm business planning issues.

www.forumforthefuture.org/futures

Room for optimism These aren’t the only outcomes imaginable: the Climate Futures project identified several more scenarios, some more ‘optimistic’ than others – but all designed to get people thinking seriously about what a climatechanging world might be like.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. The challenge of mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may be looking tougher almost by the day – but the process of thinking about future directions of policy, business, technology and individual attitudes leaves a lot of room for optimism. Four out of five of the worlds we explored were certainly on their way to accommodating climate change in one way or another by 2030. Major change is needed, yes, but even small steps taken now can open up previously unimagined paths of hope.

James Goodman is head of futures at Forum for the Future.

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Partner viewpoint

Money talks What’s holding back that big shift to low-carbon investment?

It’s time to put heads together to find a way forward, says Dax Lovegrove. uniquely placed to help set the world’s carbon dioxide emissions cuts on the right trajectory. Yet we’re acutely aware at WWF that there hasn’t yet been a major shift from high to low-carbon investments, and too many big players are still ready to invest in carbon-intensive projects such as Canada’s Alberta Tar Sands and the Kingsnorth coal plant.

Just this year an internal review at the World Bank concluded that the institution was not yet managing the environmental effects and carbon impacts of its project finance activities, and found “a persistent lack of environmental focus in each step along the lending chain”.

Over in the US, too, the sector is slow to exploit the potential of low-carbon finance.

Earlier this year the Department of Energy Cleantech's shining opportunity – can we help investors see the light?

admitted that $38.5 billion earmarked for loan guarantees on cleantech companies was “gathering dust” because it wasn’t being tapped into by investors and entrepreneurs.

We think it’s time to push the boundaries in the financial sector. Of course we’re continuing to call on the government for policy change – a strong UK Climate Change Bill, a robust phase III of the European Emissions Trading Scheme and a watertight post-Kyoto global deal – but we need to ensure that investments are reaching the right place.

We know that pressure from the outside isn’t the only way to move things forward, which is why our sustainable finance programme is convening major players, including businesses and policy makers, to actually identify the systemic barriers to economic reform.

A bank would probably say it’s to do with weak policy signals: ‘You can’t expect banks to shift investments until policy intervention gives us the certainty we need to ensure a decent return.’ A socially responsible investor would maybe blame intellectual inertia: ‘Mainstream investors know how to play the game in reading OPEC signals and financial statements from the big oil companies. But renewables are still unfamiliar territory – a new system they’re simply not geared up for.’ Others in the financial community might say that low-carbon technologies are unreliable and therefore highrisk investments…

We want to bring all these opinions round one table, so that we can start to find a way forward together. We believe that it’s time for some creative solutions to unlock the financial opportunities offered by areas such as cleantech. As the US Department of Energy’s Andy Karsner put it at the San Francisco Cleantech Forum in February: “We need disruptive thinking and organisational means and mechanisms to scale these technologies.”

That’s going to mean a whole new approach on the part of risk analysts and investment advisors, even a new skill set.

We at WWF don’t claim to have all the answers – indeed that’s the whole point of our work with the financial community. But we imagine some of the solutions might include getting leading banks, asset managers and institutional investors to build greater capacity within their organisations to support staff in these areas, or to draw up a simple list of nogo areas for new investment.

What we do know, however, is how urgent the situation is. Our report on climate solutions for 2050 states that to start making the sort of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions in line with the latest climate science, we have a window of opportunity of just five years.

– Dax Lovegrove is head of business and industry relations at WWF-UK

WWF-UK is a Forum for the Future partner. www.wwf.org.uk

36 Green Futures October 2008

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Photo: iStock

T

he finance sector is

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Forum update Paradise found Catching the breeze: Siwa’s eco-architecture does away with aircon

Messrs Brown and Cameron are far from alone when it comes to holidaying sustainably. In an international poll conducted by Lonely Planet, 93% say they would purposely consider choosing environmentally friendly travel in the future.

It’s a striking result that features in Forum’s latest report.

Paradise Found demonstrates

how the tourism industry can tap into this market, and why it’s crucial that it does. Drawing on examples from across the globe, the report sets out the hallmarks of a true paradise – a sustainable tourist development.

Water and carbon savings are high on the agenda, and there are plenty of novel schemes in place to do just that. Guests at the Orchid Hotel in Mumbai, for

example, are encouraged to save energy by hitting the ‘green button’ in their rooms, which lets the aircon ease off by two degrees. The hotel then calculates the associated saving in energy costs, and invests it in local environmental projects.

What a simple idea. Yet, together with many others, this kind of thing can help transform the sector.

Naturally, hotels built to bioclimatic designs can often dispense with air conditioning entirely. The Adrère Amellal Oasis ecolodge in Siwa, Egypt, needs only the desert breezes, thanks to its traditional Siwan architecture. But the vast majority of tourist developments have not been built sustainably, and now their response, together with action from local governments and tour operators, will be critical in determining how far the sector can improve its social and environmental performance.

Vicky Murray, senior sustainability advisor at Forum and co-author of the report,

underlines how crucial this transition is for the long-term security of the industry. “We’re working with organisations across the sector to identify opportunity as well as risk, though it’s clear that the industry will be affected more than most by climate change and water scarcity.” But, she adds, “Our report shows there are many promising signs of improvement as the industry switches on to the associated dangers. Some take quite a holistic approach – like the Aspen Skiing Company giving out 40,000 low-energy light bulbs for its visitors to take back and use in their own homes. That was part of its ‘Save Snow’ campaign, which also lobbies government on climate change. It’s selfpreservation, if you like.”

– Jon Wallace More on Forum's work in the tourism sector, including the wider Overland Heaven and Tourism 2023 reports, can be found at: www.forumforthefuture.org

Photo: flickr/wanderlust; Matt Brodie

Mastering a fresh mindset “The most important thing is not to become trapped by your own mindset.”

The twelve scholars on Forum’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development left their graduation ceremony in July with these words from Evan Davis ringing in their ears. “You should look for opportunities to twist the logic 180 degrees, rather than 20 or 30,” added Davis, the BBC’s economics editor.

His advice was very much in tune with what scholars experience on the course.

Central to it are five intensive one-month placements across the business, media, regional and national government and NGO sectors. It’s a steep learning curve, as programme manager Geraldine Creaven explains. “We ask the scholars to look closely at their preconceptions about each sector, and then seek out opportunities that will either challenge or confirm these ideas. They soon find out that, if they have entrenched attitudes

www.greenfutures.org.uk

about how a sector should be moving forward, it only inhibits their learning. So we encourage open mindedness – going into each new situation with a questioning attitude.”

It isn’t only the scholars who feel the benefit; the supporting organisations are keen to draw on their insights too. If they weren’t seeing value, organisations like the European Commission, BP and the BBC wouldn’t welcome scholar placements year after year.

“They recognise that they are benefiting a lot from having a fresh perspective from a very bright student,” says Creaven.

And with the latest intake now embarking on their year with Forum, there will soon be more gifted green minds heading their way.

– Jon Wallace

Davis: "twist the logic"

For details of Forum’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development, including the 2009 prospectus, please visit www.forumforthefuture.org/masters-course

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“If the NHS built cycle paths…”

Helen Clarkson is deputy director of Forum’s Public Sector Programme

I

feel good about cycling to work.

Yes, the road is full of crazed people (some of them pedestrians). Yes, it often rains. And yes, I have on occasion forgotten to pack my shoes. But being outside and getting exercise without having to join a gym keeps me reasonably sane.

Environmentally friendly, socially positive and easy on the wallet – cycling is an incredibly sustainable form of transport.

It’s also good for the public purse. According to a report commissioned by Cycling England, each regular cyclist – someone who uses a bike more than three times a week – should save the NHS £28.30 a year.

New cycle paths, then, must be a brilliant investment.

But there’s the rub. Yes, they’d save money for the local NHS Primary Care Trust – but the responsibility for building them lies with the local authority. If sustainable thinking is holistic systems thinking, how can it be achieved by public sector bodies that control only parts of the system?

Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) go a long way to joining the dots. They bring together local public, private and voluntary sector organisations in order to develop Local Area Agreements (LAAs) – co-ordinated initiatives that enable these sectors to work together more effectively. They are forums for the future in their own way, and naturally our Public Sector Programme wants to help them develop their ability to deliver sustainable solutions. We’re currently working on a project to bring together a group of LSPs both to cocreate solutions in their own areas, and to share learning to develop best practice.

Look, for instance, at Leeds, where the city council – a Forum partner – is demonstrating the possibilities of such joined-up solutions. The Leeds Initiative is an LAA developed in partnership with the wider Leeds Strategic Plan. One of its innovative schemes has seen the council’s jobs and skills department working with the Leeds PCT to introduce regular exercise and fitness programmes for people currently on incapacity benefit, tackling debilitating problems such as back pain and, in turn, helping them back into long-term employment.

The Leeds initiative has rightly been recognised by the government’s Beacon Scheme for excellence in local government. But such stories should not really be beacons; they should be the norm. In developing our work with LSPs, we want to find out what makes for leadership at the LSP level. What factors stop them being just another level of governance and a hindrance to progress? What ensures they instead act as a vehicle for real change in an area, transforming the lives of citizens? We’ll let you know how we get on. In the meantime, I’ll be doing my bit to save my local NHS trust that £28.30 – every little counts.

38 Green Futures October 2008

Tracking carbon in the aisles The issue of carbon labelling has become a contentious one. Are the first wave of carbon labels just a PR exercise for retailers, or could simple communication of the climate impacts of everyday products genuinely encourage sustainable consumer behaviour?

check-out carbon

the role of carbon labelling in delivering a low-carbon shopping basket

Tom Berry, Dan Crossley, Jemima Jewell June 2008

Our new report, Check-out carbon: the role of carbon labelling in delivering a low-carbon shopping basket draws together extensive research in this area, including consumer focus groups, expert interviews and independent surveys. Our aim was to explore the role that carbon labelling can play when the goal is a low-carbon shopping basket.

Sponsored by Lloyd’s Register, Check-out carbon highlights the need for a much more strategic and prioritised approach to messages about the climate change impacts of products.

Businesses need to give consumers genuine options, rather than just information. Our research shows that consumers also want business and government to help them make consumption choices; two-thirds of those polled favour removal of the worst offending products from the shelves entirely.

Taking credit The voluntary carbon market – where institutions and individuals can buy carbon reduction credits to offset their own carbon emissions – is growing at a truly staggering rate. International trades rose from $58.5 million in 2006 to $258 million in 2007.

making the voluntary carbon market work for the poor current and future roles

Alice Chapple July 2008

But as the market has grown, so too have concerns that it has merely become a distraction, taking the focus away from necessary change in the behaviour of both companies and individuals.

The quality of the credits being offered on the market has also come under scrutiny. Against this backdrop, the potential for the voluntary carbon market to deliver positive benefits, particularly for people in poorer countries, has been largely overlooked.

Our report Making the voluntary carbon markets work for the poor distils a series of interviews with a wide range of experts. It explores the opportunities, the barriers and the actions that should now be taken to make the market more effective in delivering both carbon reductions and sustainable development.

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Building “must stand up”

Martin Hunt leads Forum’s work in the built environment

I

t was somewhat unnerving.

There I was, all set to help develop a positive, forward-thinking work programme with one of Forum’s business partners. And here was the MD, introducing the internal sustainability workshop. He highlighted the company’s decline in profits.

He had important messages to get across about staff cuts. He spoke of the current lack of liquidity in the marketplace. And I began to feel like the last item on a News At Ten bulletin: “And finally, sustainable development…”

It did get better. After that sobering start, discussions became quite positive.

There was a feeling that the company could move forward with exploring new sustainable approaches and products – if a clear business case could be identified. But that meeting reflected the nature of others I

have attended of late. Glance at the recent headlines, and it’s evident that many construction and property companies are suffering at the minute.

I respect the difficulties that they are in.

But there’s a danger. In the built environment sector, businesses that don’t have sustainable development at the core of their business model might assume that environmental and social issues can be ‘dropped’ for the time being, to be picked up again when the marketplace is more buoyant. This goes on the assumption that sustainable design and construction practices are ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘must have’. I would argue that this assumption is fundamentally flawed – lacking long-term strategic thinking, and damaging to future business prospects.

Because, whatever the current market conditions, the road ahead is pretty clearly signposted. We have greater certainty about regulation; a few years ago, who would have thought we would have specific UK government targets for zero carbon buildings? The EU, too, is not going to let up on tightening environmental requirements. We also have greater clarity about the government’s expectations as a client; the sustainability criteria of Public Private Partnership projects like Building Schools for the Future are patchy but improving.

It is also pretty obvious that the case for greater eco-efficiency – doing more with less – is being strengthened as construction costs, energy prices and

landfill taxes rise. Of course, this is a consequence of current global supply and demand issues, but do we really see this upward trend changing? If not, it remains crucial for the construction industry (including our architects) to increase the longevity of our buildings and their components, add long-term value to existing stock through energy efficiency, and improve the reusability of materials already contained in our built environment.

With the current decline in housing sales also placing greater emphasis on retrofit and refurbishment rather than new build, a forward-thinking company would be looking to align themselves and their workforce to these market developments.

Speaking to those involved in delivering sustainable built environments, I’m confident that the slowdown in construction will free up more time for real thought leadership around the projects that are going ahead. There are many talented and progressive individuals looking to incorporate sustainable design out there, but such has been the ‘heat’ in the market over recent years that they have often been so pressed for time that they have had to compromise their aspirations with operational reality. Now is the time to go back to the drawing board and rethink the way we build. This is not high risk. It’s about investing in some serious long-term thinking, and anticipating the opportunities that are likely to arise as we move towards more sustainable communities, buildings and infrastructure.

Zero in

Embraced by companies as diverse as airlines, ice-cream makers and reinsurance giants, ‘carbon neutrality’ is a phrase that has captured the corporate imagination. But what may seem like a simple term for a simple concept – that an organisation, product or service, can have no net impact on the climate – is in fact shrouded in controversy, with wide-ranging assumptions lying behind many claims to neutrality.

Getting to Zero: Defining Corporate Carbon Neutrality is the first comprehensive study of the term and its application by business. A collaboration with the US non-profit organisation Clean Air – Cool Planet, the report aims to move towards a consensus on the meaning of carbon neutrality, exploring a number of the claims that have been made so far, and making recommendations about what should lie behind future declarations.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

Setting corporate sights is a crucial step. After all, targeting a zero net impact on the climate is a strong ambition. As Getting to Zero points out, setting this goal has the potential to drive ongoing change within an organisation, while promoting a shared responsibility with suppliers and customers for emissions beyond the organisation’s immediate control.

New partners Capgemini and Skandia have joined Forum for the Future as members since the last issue of Green Futures.

For more information about membership and partnership with the organisation, visit our website at www.forumforthefuture.org

> Green Futures October 2008 39

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Forum for the Future works in partnership with over 130 leading organisations, mainly from the public and private sectors, to find practical ways to deliver a sustainable future. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org

ABN AMRO Lesley Holloway, 020 7678 8000

Corus Stephen Blaylock, 01244 89 2713

Land Rover Jaguar Cars Fran Leedham, 01926 641111

Serco Group Simon Usher, 020 8843 2411

Advantage West Midlands Simon Slater, 0121 380 3677

Crest Nicholson Paul Donnelly, 01932 264410

Leeds City Council Tom Knowland, 0113 395 0643

Severn Trent Kathryn Barker, 0121 722 4314

Aga Foodservice Group Alison Neville, 0121 711 6000

Dacorum Borough Council Elizabeth Savage, 01442 228739

London Borough of Croydon Kia Colbeck, 020 8726 6000

AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695

Devon County Council Dave Slocomb, 01392 382245

Middlesbrough Council Bob King, 01642 728233

Skanska Tanya Barnes, 01923 423906 Greg Chant-Hall, 01923 423614

Alliance Boots Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766

Duchy Originals Inger Cessford, 0208 831 6800

Marks & Spencer Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885

Apetito Mark Lovett, 01225 753636

Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111

Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054

Arup John Turzynski, 020 7755 2580

Ecover Belgium NV Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500

Minoan Group www.minoangroup.com

Asda Stores Julian Walker-Palin, www.asda-corporate.com

EDF Energy David Ferguson, 07875 119978

Morley Fund Management Tim Barker, 020 7809 6000

Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023

Entec UK Ltd Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128

The National Trust Mike Collins, 01793 817708

BAA Matthew Gorman, 020 7243 1264

Environment Agency Nerys Croft, 0117 9142 968

Nationwide Building Society Ian Duncan, 01793 657625

Balfour Beatty Sally Brearly, 020 7216 6813

Eurostar Louisa Bell, 020 7922 2442

The Natural Step International Louise Bielenstein, +46 8 789 29 00

BBC Yogesh Chauhan, yogesh.chauhan@bbc.co.uk

Fife Council Neil Gateley, 01592 413552

Northumbrian Water Louise Hunter, 0191 301 34050

BP Christine Dewey, 020 7496 4000

Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239

North West Regional Development Agency Mark Atherton, 01925 400283

British Cement Association David Pocklington, 01276 608700

Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227802435

OGC Buying Solutions Tristram Hardman, 01603 704522

BT Environment Unit, 0800 731 2403

FirstGroup Terri Vogt, 07799 885171

OZOlabs Tamara Giltsoff, www.ozocar.com

Cadbury Alison Ward, 01895 615568

Flintshire Council Erica Mackie, 01352 703217

PepsiCo Steve John, 0118 903 2730

Cafédirect Zachary Dominitz, 020 7490 9631

Friends Provident Amanda Adey, 01306 654420

Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481

Calor Paul Blacklock, 01926 318 773

Good Energy Penelope Chapple, 01249 766090

Pret A Manger Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888

Capgemini James Robey, 0870 904 5761

GSH Group Robert Greenfield, 01782 200400

Pru PIM Siobhán Hewitt-Devine, 020 7548 6729

Cargill Europe Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916

Guardian News and Media Jo Confino, jo.confino@guardian.co.uk

Pureprint Group Yvie Dear, 01825 768811

Carillion Louise Rhydderch, 01902 316258

Halcrow Group Andrew Kulth, 0207 6027282

Rail Safety and Standards Board Joanna Gilligan, 020 7904 7655

CDC Group Innes Meek, 020 7484 7700

IGD Dr James Northen, 01923851919

RBS David Graham, 0131 523 7453

Cheltenham Borough Council Carol Rabbette, 01242 774928

Igloo Regeneration David Roberts, 07900 882990

The Royal Academy of Engineering Ian Bowbrick, 020 7227 0504

City of London Council Simon Mills, 020 7332 3598

InterfaceFLOR www.interfaceflor.com

Royal Dutch Shell Elfrida Hughes, +31610974798

Climate Care Michael Buick, 01865 207000

John Laing plc David Micciche, 020 7901 3200

RSA Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712

Commission for Rural Communities Paul Pennycook, 01242 534056 www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk

John Lewis Partnership Gemma Lacey, 0207 5924412

Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528 681

Johnson Matthey Don Harrison, 020 7269 8400

RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716

JT Group John Pontin, 01275 373393

Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Caroline Miller, 020 7695 3078

Kingfisher Christina Allen, 0207 644 1142

SC Johnson Chris Lambert, 01784 484100

Kraft Foods Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101

Scottish and Newcastle UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277

ConocoPhillips Inger Mette Staalesen, +47 52 02 1818 Co-operative Group Chris Shearlock, 0161 827 6209 Cornwall County Council Anthony Weight, 01872 322633

40 Green Futures October 2008

Skandia Jo Gilbey, 01703 334411 South East England Development Agency Simon Richardson, 01634 899900 South West Tourism Neil Warren, 01392 353234 Swindon City Council Lynne Forrester, 01793 463197 Tesco Helen Chamberlin, 01992 644 542 The Tetley Group Sara Howe, 020 8338 4590 Thames Water Utilities Darren Towers, 0118 373 9063 Time Warner Katherine McQuaid, www.timewarner.com/corp Transport for London Jeanette Baartman, 020 7126 3432 Triodos Bank James Niven, 0117 980 9721 TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 Unilever UK George Gordon, 01932 263 000 Virgin Atlantic Airways Jill Brady, www.virgin-atlantic.com VisitBritain Jason Freezer, 0208 563 3180 Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600 Welsh Assembly Government Georgina Haarhoff, 029 2082 1724 Welsh Local Government Association Rachel Jowitt, 029 2046 8626 Wessex Water Dan Green, 01225 526000 West Sussex County Council Karen Baker, 01243 756859 Willmott Dixon George Martin, 01932 584700 Wm Morrison Supermarkets Gillian Hall, gillian.hall@morrisonsplc.co.uk Wrexham County Council Michael Cantwell, 01978 292255 WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 Yorkshire Forward Mike Smith, 0113 394 9741

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Partner viewpoint

Package deal Holidaymakers shouldn’t have to worry about carbon offsets – that’s the tour operator’s job.

How can catching the rays on the Med…

O

ne in every ten Brits

thinks that ‘carbon offsetting’ means walking instead of driving to work. In a recent survey by YouGov, only 35% understood the term. And one in three thought it would cost a lot more than it actually does. One way or another, it’s clear there’s some way to go before your average holidaymaker starts doing it.

Thompson and First Choice are hoping to help change that. The two top holiday brands, both owned by TUI UK and Ireland, will offer a low-cost scheme from next summer whereby partial offsets are automatically included in the price of a holiday. Customers can opt out if they want, but the amount is low enough to dissuade them from doing so – at £1 per adult, or 50 pence per child. As a further inducement, the company matches the donation in full.

Since the scheme was launched to First Choice customers last year, over a third have agreed to make the donation. Carbon offsetting schemes in general have lower takeup rates, most under 10%. Sarah Perry, the company’s sustainable development manager, believes they are also reaching groups that don’t normally offset: “Our analysis of the fund shows that young families on low incomes are more likely to donate than those on higher incomes – not necessarily the audience you’d expect for a ‘green’ initiative.”

The First Choice scheme raised £1 million for its World Care Fund in its first year, and offset around 20% of the carbon dioxide

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…bring light to Zambia?

emissions from First Choice Airways’ flights.

First Choice and Thompson together expect to collect up to £2.5 million between them over the next year.

But Perry thinks that the real strength of the fund is that it highlights environmental issues for customers. “We found that mainstream holidaymakers do care about the environment, yet when they’re booking their holiday it’s not in the front of their minds,” she says. “This helps bring it to the fore.” Words like ‘carbon offsetting’ aren’t used in the sales pitch – a sound decision judging by polling results – but the company does produce customer literature that explains where the money goes, and its travel agents are trained and tested in the benefits of the scheme.

And it’s a good story to tell to customers, because it isn’t just about carbon emissions, but humans. Contributions go through the offset management specialists ClimateCare towards projects such as the improvement of hydroelectric schemes in Zambia, to make sure they provide a reliable supply of power to schools and hospitals. Gold Standard accreditation ensures the projects contribute to sustainable development in its broadest sense, rather than simply reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

One fifth of the money raised through the World Care Fund is donated to responsible tourism projects run by The Travel Foundation.

Perry tells of one Masai village in Kenya where local people now get a fair cut of the trade thanks to the scheme. “Visitors were driven

there and the driver would hand over money from tourists to the local chief,” she says. “But while they were looking around the village, the driver would take back the money and give the chief a paltry sum. Now the villagers’ income has increased 800%, and they’ve spent the money on things like improvements to the local school and access to clean water.”

Perry is optimistic about the future of the scheme. “The YouGov research might show that many people don’t understand carbon offsetting – but it also told us that over 70% of people would consider doing it. That’s a huge potential audience for us to work with on environmental and social issues. Our challenge is to make our green messages mainstream enough for them to listen.” – Iain Aitch

In-flight information TUI travel companies are doing their own bit to reduce emissions, with a focus on fuel efficiency in planes. Last year, they reduced carbon emissions by 34,000 tonnes, by introducing slower speeds and landing approaches, and by offering discounts to passengers who brought lighter luggage.

TUI UK & Ireland is a Forum for the Future partner. www.thomson.co.uk/environment www.firstchoice.co.uk/environment

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Feature

Smarter bytes, slimmer footprints

W

hen US Congressman

Edward Markey was invited to address last December’s climate change summit in Bali, he felt he couldn’t justify the environmental impact of flying 10,000 miles to do so.

Instead, he delivered his talk on ‘virtual Bali’, a computergenerated island in the online world of Second Life.

Yet, strictly speaking, even his appearance as an avatar had a real-world carbon cost. Second Life, along with every website, email, online video and downloaded podcast, exists in the memory, processors and hard drives of real physical computers. They all use electric power – much of it generated from fossil fuels.

The media had a field day a little while ago when a rough calculation suggested that each avatar on Second Life used about as much energy as “the average citizen

42 Green Futures October 2008

“ ”

The internet could account for around 5% of global electricity consumption

of Brazil”. Although subsequently revealed as an overestimate, this certainly served to raise awareness that even virtual action has a real-world impact [see GF63, p48]. As yet, there is no authoritative data on quite how power-hungry the internet has become. But when a researcher on the Uclue paid answers service added up published figures for the consumption of networked computers, data centres and all the associated infrastructure and transmission networks, the result was startling. The sum worked out at a headline figure of 868 billion kWh per year – which is over 5% of total global electricity consumption.

So much, then, for the assumption that computer and internet use is somehow automatically environmentally friendly because it is ‘virtual’. Worldwide, according to the UK’s wonderfully titled minister for

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Illustration: Konstantin Inozemtsev/iStock

Bil lT ho he t f mp o t h s on ig online e w f e world ight. l l a u – and els the t o vir t point y a s the w

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Hard wear It’s not just software which needs to change; computer kit, too, from its manufacture to disposal, causes plenty of wear and tear to the planet. But change is afoot. Apple’s MacBook Air is PVC-free, has a recyclable aluminium frame and a mercuryfree screen. Toshiba labels the different types of plastic used in its computers so that they can be separated out when the system is disassembled.

And recyclability is part of Dell’s drive to make its computers the greenest ever. Even manufacturers without such lofty aspirations are beginning to realise that fulfilling their obligations under the EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive will be a lot easier with well-designed hardware. – BT

ACDC In 2006 Google opened up a long-overdue debate about PC power supplies. Questioning the reliance on a computer systems architecture that was largely fixed when the IBM PC was launched in 1981, its engineers advocate moving from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12V standard for all circuitry.

This would reduce power consumption drastically.

The current mix of components and circuitry means that AC mains power, reaching home and business PCs via overspecified power supply units, is being shifted and stepped to supply a whole range of small and mostly DC voltages used to run processors, graphics cards and drives.

Meanwhile, new work on DC chips that have an onboard converter could enhance battery life, and therefore reduce the need to keep recharging mobiles and handhelds from mains supplies. – BT

No heavy metal here

transformational government, Tom Watson, “computers are responsible for the same quantity of carbon emissions as the airline industry. It is a serious problem that requires a serious solution.”

Many technology professionals remain blissfully ignorant of the true cost of computing – although as electricity prices rise, that blissful ignorance is fading fast.

At the personal level, the introduction of smart meters should help make home and office users more aware of the energy consumption of PCs, screens, wifi routers and printers. Devices like the Wattson can even encourage geeks like myself to compete for greenie points, by allowing us to upload our usage data to an online community where it can be tracked against other users.

You just have to hope this will spur savings of more power than is needed to run the servers supporting this forum…

Photo: UltraOrto, S.A./Shutterstock

Power down on the server farm At what you might call the impersonal level, a key issue on computing’s carbon-cutting agenda is the energy hunger of the vast data centres which have emerged to sustain the growth of the web. Also known as server farms, these contain thousands of networked computers working together to provide the data storage and processing power needed by the likes of Google, Amazon, Yahoo! and eBay. And they use vast amounts of power, accounting for 1.5% of America’s electricity use, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Worldwide, say some estimates, the bill could grow from $18.5 billion in 2005 to $250 billion by 2012.

Already, some companies are finding that the running costs of their data centres may even be their single largest expense apart from the payroll. And that, as Bob

www.greenfutures.org.uk

“ ”

Tomorrow’s websites could be hosted in low-impact buildings, with renewable power on tap

Worral of Sun Microsystems recently wrote in Forbes magazine, makes a powerful case for investment on more energy-efficient data centres.

It makes it a big business opportunity too. And, surprise surprise, the big guns in the industry are already training their sights on the big bucks that could come their way. While Intel and AMD promote the energy management features of their latest generation of processors, IBM has launched Project Big Green, a play on the company’s nickname of ‘Big Blue’, which includes new cooling technologies for servers, real-time monitoring of power usage and new designs for large data centres that will significantly reduce their carbon footprint.

It’s not just the chip and server manufacturers who are getting in on the act, either. Software developers and government energy agencies are involved too, sometimes working hand in hand. The US Department of Energy, for instance, offers DC Pro, a software tool which examines everything from power distribution to cooling systems to measure data centres’ overall energy efficiency.

The cooling aspect is crucial. Processors and other components generate a great deal of heat in operation.

Until recently this was considered a waste product, and lots of extra power – as much as 63% of a data centre’s total usage – would be used to run air conditioning and cooling systems. Surely there was a smarter answer?

While others focus on the hot chips themselves, computer giant HP has made a big splash with its Dynamic SMART Cooling system, which can slash both the power bill and the carbon footprint quite dramatically, thanks to integrated software and hardware management at the level of overall system design.

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When lean means green It's sleeker, lighter, faster, greener with no hard drive

savings of £174,000 and shrinks its carbon footprint by some 260 tonnes. “The mind boggles,” remarked Prince Charles at a business summit on climate change in May, when he cited a similar investment by recruitment company Reed, which saved 26% on its IT energy spend in the first year.

Wyse Technology, who provided that upgrade, estimates that a typical payback period for thin computing investment stands

At the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University, Andy Hopper and Andy Rice are working on a more radical approach: moving the server farms to locations where green power is easily available. Companies such as Google, says Rice, are already building data centres near hydropower stations for energy cost reasons, but the work he is doing relates more to harnessing renewable technologies whose output is intermittent, such as wind and solar.

The physical location of a server is not entirely irrelevant in the internet age, but there is certainly no need to have computing power in the same building, street or even city as its users. Perhaps tomorrow’s websites will be hosted in low-impact centres carefully designed to blend in with windy hillsides and wave-beaten shorelines, generating at least some of their own energy needs – and allowing us to surf with a clearer conscience.

Saving strategies A recent European ‘Green IT Barometer’ survey, sponsored by Dell, says that companies with green computing strategies already in place can expect to reap

44 Green Futures October 2008

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Computers are responsible for the same quantity of carbon emissions as the airline industry

at eleven months. Not bad, considering that the servers used for processing have a life expectancy of seven to nine years – up to three times that of a standard PC. The improvement in wireless communication technologies and infrastructure also makes it perfectly practical to use thin client terminals on the move – cutting not only capital, but support and maintenance costs too. – JW

savings averaging almost 15% in the next 12 months.

Quick wins don’t come much quicker than turning computers off when they’re not being used. The latest generation of power management software, deployed over entire networks, gives organisations the ability to do exactly that – switching off workplace PCs according to schedules set by IT managers. As well as running software updates and backing-up unsaved work before shutting down (protecting against both virus and panic attacks), the software also measures and reports on total energy use, enabling organisations to determine just how much energy is being saved and how they can save more. Dell claims to be saving $1.8 million per year thanks to running 1E’s NightWatchman on its network of 50,000 computers. A quick calculation reveals the investment as a ‘no-brainer’ – saving around $36 per computer per year for an average installation cost of just half that amount.

Past performance suggests that a universal switch-off at work won’t happen any other way.

According to the National Energy Foundation, an astonishing six million computers were left on over Christmas in 2006.

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Photos: Serp/Shutterstock

The common PC is, not to mince words, a ‘thick client’. Paradoxically, that’s because it has so much intelligence itself – so the commands it receives via keystrokes and mouse clicks can all be processed ‘locally’. It only passes data on to a central server for communications (such as emails) or remote backup.

A ‘thin client’ system turns that on its head. The local PC becomes merely a bridge between the individual user and the ‘remote’ server: it’s there that the commands are processed, with the results displayed back to the user on-screen. Everything appears the same but, with radically less processing to do, thin client PCs require much less energy.

Typically, they run on just 7 watts, whereas a standard thick client PC might demand 70150 watts when it is working, and 15 even in ‘sleep’ mode.

It means using more energy down the line where the work is done, but much less overall. A study by US research group Gartner showed that most PCs use less than 10% of their processing capacity – yet the energy they require remains largely the same as if they were running flat out. A thin client system simply allows organisations to take advantage of that gap, as central servers can be scaled up and down much more efficiently to meet demand.

According to Sun Microsystems, its thin client network deployed at the Rural Payments Agency last year makes annual

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Beating the bloat

Photos: Gilmanshin/Shutterstock; Wyse Technology Inc

Software is driven by marketing deadlines. All too often, doing the coding so the programme runs quickly has taken a backseat to simply doing the coding quickly. Result: ‘new and improved’ operating systems usually need ‘new and improved computers’ to run them. The old kit becomes prematurely obsolete, contributing to the mountain of e-waste by an estimated 1.2 million tonnes per year in the UK alone. And ever more resources are used to produce the replacements.

This need not happen, says a report by the Office of Government Commerce. Drawing on tests carried out by the likes of Ofwat and the Ministry of Defence, it makes a convincing case for avoiding ‘proprietary’ operating systems in favour of open source alternatives, most notably that of Linux. Such software, says the report, is recognised as requiring “less memory and a slower processor speed for the same functionality” than the more commonplace operating systems from Microsoft. While computers running Microsoft typically have to be upgraded every 3-4 years, those running Linux won’t require an upgrade for 6-8 years, the report concludes.

Vista, the latest incarnation of Microsoft Windows, has attracted especially heavy criticism for its software ‘bloat’. According to the makers of Windows Sentinel, a third party tool to measure the efficiency of the operating system, it runs up to 40% slower than its predecessor, XP, on the same machine. In response, Microsoft has launched projects such as MinWin to streamline its code sets – a huge but essential task as battling the bloat becomes a sink or swim issue in an increasingly competitive market. – JW

The UK government has also put its commitment on the line. If the Cabinet Office’s Greening Government ICT report is anything to go by, “products that will enable active power management for all networked devices” should soon be installed across Whitehall and beyond.

Speaking at the report launch in June, Tom Watson dramatised the impact in terms of carbon savings.

“Turning off every one of Whitehall’s 500,000 computers at night,” he said, “would have the same effect as taking 40,000 cars off the road.”

Between now and 2012, Watson promised, central government would make the energy consumption of its ICT systems carbon-neutral. “We won’t achieve this just by offsetting, but by making serious changes to the way we do business,” he added. And by 2020 its ICT should be carbon-neutral over its entire lifetime, including manufacture and disposal. It’s an impressive aspiration.

Achieved – and emulated across business and society – it would mark the transformation of an under-recognised problem into a flagship for a low-carbon world.

Bill Thompson is a well-known technology critic and commentator on digital culture. Additional material by Jon Wallace.

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“

Turning off every one of Whitehall’s 500,000 computers at night would have the same effect as taking 40,000 cars off the road

” Thin client, slim footprint

Smart cuts Crucial as it is to make and use computers more efficiently, this is not where ICT can offer its most important contribution to combating climate change.

The really big story is about how it can improve efficiency in other sectors with far greater footprints.

The world could save an astonishing 7.8 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2020 – in other words, cut 15% off the projected total for that year – by the application of ‘SMART ICT’ to manufacturing processes, home and office space, the energy sector, and transport and logistics.

That estimate comes from a report published by the Climate Group in June, entitled (almost inevitably) SMART 2020 – where we also get the acronym spelled out, as ‘Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology’. One of its specific examples is the smart energy grid, where information flows directly from consumers’ smart meters to their energy providers. These can then fine-tune the way they meet demand, and so cut down the need for excess capacity to safeguard against unexpected surges in consumption. This could save India 30% in power transmission and distribution losses alone – and is also attracting heavy research investment in the US in the wake of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. HP, which is ramping up its efforts to take advantage of the enormous opportunities at hand for green ICT, gives prominence to smart technology in its own recent report, Low Carbon IT Solutions. This highlights the potential for cutting carbon through ‘dematerialising’ everything from documents to music, where sales have gone virtual so fast the industry has been transformed. The benefits, at least for its carbon footprint, are clear: downloading 56 minutes of digital music requires half the resources of buying the CD online, says Forum for the Future in Connected – ICT and sustainable development [GF69, 38], and is two and a half times more energy-efficient than shopping for it on the high street.

You can’t dematerialise trucks, trains and planes, of course, but there’s still a role for smart thinking here, too. Supply chain management tools can make significant cuts in the footprint of large freight movements, says the report. – JW

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T

hat’s good – it’s buying me a

curry.” Mark Smith’s reaction to the first payment he received for ‘The Man in Seat 61’ (www.seat61.com) is somehow typical of the man behind this pioneering train travel advice site [see box].

Surfing on the back of a surge of interest in slow, lowcarbon travel, Seat61 now attracts half a million visitors a month. Mark modestly declines to reveal how much it’s making from affiliate scheme payments and the like. But it did enable him to give up his day-job at the Department for Transport last autumn… It was a big but liberating leap.

Rejecting the notion of a ‘lifestyle business’ (“I hate the term”), he does confess to feeling guilty, in a very British way, about making money from what started as a hobby.

“I half expect someone to turn around and say ‘That’s

“ ”

Flying doesn’t always save you time.

enough of that, sonny, time to get a real job’. It doesn’t feel like work, but I love the fact I no longer have to commute, that the information I give is free and always will be, and that it enables me to travel.”

And travelling we are. I’m interviewing Mark as he sits in Seat 61, his favourite spot in the first class Eurostar carriage that gave the site its name. We’re speeding through Flanders’ fields to Brussels to enjoy Moules Frites and Trappist beer.

The website began rather humbly back in 2001 following a debate with a film producer cousin about what movie character they’d play. Mark settled on the enigmatic ‘Man in Seat 61’. A few days later he picked up a ‘Teach Yourself HTML’ book and created his first web pages, outlining rail routes from London to several key

What is seat61.com? > The site offers straightforward, demystifying advice on travel by train and ship > You can’t book, but it does provide links and contacts with agents and rail companies > It offers clear, current information on train services and ticket costs across the world from Siberia to Senegal (not a connecting service!)

As Martin Wright rightly says, no matter how eco your home, it’s what you do in it that counts [The future is retro-fit, GF Special Publication, pp22-23]. We could spend millions on retro-fits but we are wasting our time if people still have homes full of gadgets switched on 24/7 and three large cars/SUVs on the drive. Re-educating the whole country into a shift in mentality and lifestyle would cut carbon emissions much more than solar panels or roof-mounted wind turbines.

Corrie Cuthbertson ‘Des res, future style’ [GF69, p34] is spot on: achieving higher levels of the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) should not be obstructed by a reluctance to adopt aesthetically different designs. Good architects are rising to this challenge, but what about the planners – particularly in rural areas, where the government tells us more homes must be built? Only a handful of homes have ever got permission through the special exception made for ‘innovative design’ in the countryside.

Pete Thompson (currently awaiting planning permission for the Lowhouse, an innovative eco-home in Essex)

Photo: Ed Gillespie

Home truths Right seat, wrong napkin

42 Green Futures July 2008

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Ed Gillespie, Creative Director of Futerra, is working on a book about slow travel. He and Mark travelled to Brussels courtesy of Eurostar. Tickets from St Pancras or Ebbsfleet to anywhere in Belgium normally cost from £59 return.

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A trip for two to Barcelona Newcastle Manchester

Amsterdam London

to

Bu

Paris

da

pe

st

Key Time in hours

kgCO2/person best case/worse case

Geneva

369

“

Creating overland heaven Who wouldn’t want to swap the misery of the airport queue, for the luxury AND low carbon virtues of overland travel in Europe? But it’s not always that easy to arrange. The information is there (courtesy of the brilliant Seat 61), but it’s difficult to book. Even if the journey time is comparable, it’s more expensive. And there’s no easy one-stop shop to sort everything out for you.

This is the early feedback from Forum For The Future’s research on its new Overland Heaven project. There are clear barriers that need tackling. But there are also opportunities to make train, bus and ferry travel more attractive.

By addressing them, Overland Heaven aims to help change the landscape of European travel, because those journeys have the potential to be a real positive choice. Once you’re over the initial booking hurdle, you can relax, or work, on the train to Florence; party on the ski train to Geneva; or bird-watch on the ferry to Amsterdam.

The overland trip to Barcelona [below], with a carbon footprint as much as 90% less than flying, is just one example. Leaving London by Eurostar on Friday afternoon, there’s time to finish off a bit of work before you get to Paris.

Dinner and a good night’s R&R on the sleeper (saving you a night’s hotel) brings you into Barcelona bright and early on Saturday morning – ready for the weekend.

As our diagram shows, it does take longer than the plane and it is more expensive. But it’s so much lower in carbon and potentially much more relaxing and productive too. For carbon we cite a range – because there are better planes and better trains and worse ones too. A full fuel efficient coach is better than a half empty diesel train… but it’s safe to say that even the worst scenarios for overland travel are much better than flying. – Stephanie Draper

17

Ed Gillespie meets The Man in Seat 61

16

European cities, and boldly announcing: “Do you know you can reach Africa by train in 48 hours?” An email from the Guardian’s travel editor followed, to which Mark’s first reaction was “Which one of my friends is winding me up now?” But the enquiry was genuine and his site was made their ‘Website of the Week’ in May 2001.

It was all the encouragement Mark needed, as he began to appreciate that his voice wasn’t just a ‘cry in the wilderness’. Motivated by the paradox that ‘it’s so easy to travel by train, yet so hard to find out how to do it’, he spent a couple of hours a day developing the site during his journey to work, building it up into something extremely impressive in both its detail and its accessible, down-to-earth tone.

A glimpse at Seat 61’s guest book is testimony to the appreciation of his visitors. It’s a gushing deluge of gratitude, and disbelief that the comprehensive, practical information has all been collated by one man, serving a market utterly failed by rail companies and travel agents.

There are good reasons for this, as Mark, with his old rail regulator’s hat on, explains. “Eurostar is not interested in selling tickets beyond Paris; similarly there’s little benefit or incentive to encourage cross-selling of tickets between different European train companies. The travel world, whether it’s business or leisure, wants to push you towards flying, as it’s too much hassle to organise the alternatives.”

It’s because of these frustrating institutional barriers that people want Mark to ‘hand-hold’ them through the often archaic ticketing processes of the global rail industry. His site attracts a mixture of train enthusiasts, those that are mortally afraid or just fed up of flying, and folk who, like me, have consciously forsaken aviation for environmental reasons.

On the train vs plane debate Mark is scathing, describing the current growth in short-haul flights as “totally ludicrous”. He’s swift to point out the flaws in the time and cost arguments that superficially favour flying. “The cost of a cheap flight doesn’t include airport tax, luggage fee or transport to and from the airport either end, so comparing only direct ticket prices is unfair. Equally, flying doesn’t always save you time”, argues Mark, expounding on the advantages of city centre to city centre travel and the comfort of Spanish ‘train hotels’. ‘To arrive in Barcelona for a morning meeting you’d either have to fly out at the crack of dawn, or the day before and have a night in a hotel. By train the cost of the hotel is included and you’re asleep for most of the journey. You don’t check into a hotel and say ‘How many hours does this hotel take?’”

So how can we bring about a revolution in rail travel and lure people off planes? “We need to level the playing field and tax aviation fuel. Taxes should be proportionate to carbon intensity. They are supposed to correct market failure, and global warming is potentially the biggest market failure in history.”

As for the future of his site, Mark is confident that it has reached a critical mass that a bigger, commercial rival would find hard to emulate. Seat61 is not a booking service and Mark has no intention of turning it into one.

“It won’t make me a millionaire”, he shrugs, “‘but as long as it pays the mortgage I’m happy. The site helps people and sustains my family. What could be better?”

Riding with the Rail Guru

Cost (£)

323

A recession is an excellent opportunity to bring economic and environmental considerations together [‘Into the red – out with the green?’, GF69, pp16-21].

They are inextricably related, a part of the same thing, and we need to make sure that the public and political debate is framed in those terms. Reducing consumption (whether petrol, food or anything else) is a win/win on both counts.

Brenda Dunphy

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Riding the recession

7.5

Also in this issue: • What price carbon?

• Rowan Williams, turbulent priest • Cleantech sweeps America

Forum for the Future’s transport expert Rupert Fausset responds: Radiative forcing due to emissions at altitude is estimated to at least double the climate impact of flying. Even without factoring this in, Defra figures put rail at 60g CO2/passenger km and short haul flights at 130g. Our Overland Heaven project finds that switching to trains or coaches normally saves at least half the carbon, despite some indirect routing.

And aircraft can only use fossil fuels, while the electricity used by trains could be low-carbon-generated.

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Will recession trigger green growth?

Florence

Experience

450

Out of the crunch

What are the CO2 benefits of going to Europe overland instead of flying? Do your calculations include a radiative forcing factor to account for the extra damage done by air travel [‘Riding with the Rail Guru’, GF69, pp42-43]?

Shane

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Overland heaven?

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Letters

booking

Barcelona

door to check in check-in journey arrival

Green Futures July 2008 43

Overland Heaven is going to be hard to sell – unless people have got lots of time, money and patience. I’m flying from my home in northern Italy to the Lake District, but returning by train – which is expensive as well as a real pain to arrange. There’s undoubtedly a market for a travel agent to simplify the process, but they’ll need to work out a way to cut out cost rather than add it.

David Green Futures responds: The current price (if not the cost) of cheap flights can be quite unreal. But joined-up rail booking is getting better.

Best guidance? The Man in Seat 61 (www.seat61.com).

letters@greenfutures.org.uk

Comment

Why not post a comment or join the debate at

www.greenfutures.org.uk where your views will speedily reach our many thousands of online users.

You can always email us in the usual way at letters@greenfutures.org.uk Those of you who are averse to, or unskilled in, the ways of the wired world, can of course still send letters by post to:

Moto cross?

If Indians gave up their scooters for city cars like the Tata Nano, one ill effect would be “millions more tonnes of carbon pumped into the air”, says Martin Wright [‘And another thing’, GF68, p48]. Yet the CTC cycling organisation wants motorcycles banned from bus lanes, accusing them of emitting five times more junk than the average car. Just how bad are motorbikes?

Callum Johnston Green Futures responds: Tata itself says that even its tiny Nano would emit three times more CO2 than a motorbike. But on ‘other nasties’, motorcyles compare very badly with modern cars, emitting hundreds of times more hydrocarbons (which contribute to the formation of greenhouse gases), and tens of times more particulates (linked to an increase in lung cancer and asthma).

Virtual virtues The usability and accessibility of online services [‘Facing up to techno-fix?’, GF68, p39] is something that concerns me at HP Labs, as we look at how they can reduce travel and face-to-face interactions.

Over time, I believe these ways of doing things will become better designed, and also more ‘natural’ to people; today’s young ‘digital natives’ are already more at home with them than us older ‘digital immigrants’.

But both access and use is, and will always be, difficult for some people.

So, on the technical side, we need to look at extending the scope for specially designed devices to provide simple service functionality – as well as for people to use more familiar devices such as mobile phones or TVs. The second approach is social.

A widespread move to online services can allow significant cost and environmental savings, for example by replacing supermarkets with warehouses and daily delivery services.

How society chooses to spend those savings is key. I believe we should decide, up front, to spend some of them on funding a network where community members would visit vulnerable or marginalised people and help them use the online services effectively.

Chris Preist, Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab, HP Labs

Green Futures (letters), 19/23 Ironmonger Row, London, EC1V 3QN

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The Knowledge:

Paul Monaghan, The Co-operative Group

“As Rocky says, it’s not how hard you can hit; it’s how hard you can be hit and keep going forward.”

“

T

he credit crunch and oil prices give me hope”

I know it’s perverse, but in times of adversity, people are willing to consider the unthinkable. The Co-operative Bank came up with its ethical policy on the way out of the early ’90s recession – and that was with Thatcher in government and Milton Friedman as a dominant influence on economics. If the credit crunch slows global consumption it could just be the breathing space we need to tackle CO2 emissions.

came up with their co-operative principles in the 19th century, it took real vision. Everybody blackballed them – no one in the area would sell them stocks for their shop, so they had to personally wheelbarrow flour in from Manchester. That tenacity in the face of adversity is just awesome.

Rocky V is an inspiration to me, too: “It’s not how hard you can hit; it’s how hard you can be hit and keep going forward”.

Paul Monaghan, head of social goals and sustainability at The Co-operative Group, was in conversation with Hannah Bullock.

“Without proper resources, I can’t do jack” I could be the greatest theorist in the world on environmental issues, but if I don’t secure a budget and people, I’m stuffed. When I joined in ’96, the ‘environment department’ was me, but I made a case for it – I said, “If you give me more people I’ll deliver this, I’ll deliver that…”

Today I’ve got a sustainability team of 30 with an annual spend of about £10 million.

Because the Co-operative doesn’t have shareholder pressure for short-term returns, the door is more ajar to new ideas. Choice editing, for example – taking inefficient white goods off the shelves, or making all our own brand coffee fair trade. We still have to make a business case, but it helps that we have a history of taking a stand – boycotting South Africa back in the ’60s, and ten years ago saying we wouldn’t invest in fossil fuel extraction or processing.

Conversely, some things just come about by a confluence of circumstances. The solar panel clad CIS tower was a listed building that needed recladding – one man’s job was to literally stick the tiles back on as they fell off, so we went for PV panels instead!

“ ”

Rocky is my inspiration

“Environmental groups must step up their game” They’ve been absolute stars over the last 20 years, raising the profile of green issues. But they got so used to knocking on closed doors that when companies started asking ‘OK, what’s your answer, then?’ they were caught on the back foot and came up with solutions that have been proved to be wrong in certain cases.

They pushed for airfreight labelling, for example, and I had to put a serious business case together saying why we wouldn’t do that. I mean, just 0.3% of the UK’s CO2 emissions come from airfreight – it’s incredible! I can’t understand why everyone was focusing on beans flown in from Kenya, but not plasma TVs imported from Korea.

Evidence-based policy-making has disappeared and I worry that things are being done for philosophical reasons.

“I couldn’t do without my shit sieve” You can’t rely on what you read on environmental issues. We get so much shit passed to us on so many pieces of paper, we have to get to the facts. Studying life sciences has stood me in good stead, as has training in The Natural Step.

“The Rochdale Pioneers and Rocky Balboa keep me going” Today, there are more people employed in the co-operative movement globally than there are in multinationals. Yet when the Rochdale Pioneers

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Comment

And another thing…

When corporates start to sound like campaigners, environmentalists get upset.

Martin Wright wonders why.

“Business is effectively admitting that it needs the firm hand of government to force it to cut carbon. Hypocrisy? Hardly...” if they do and damned if they don’t.

‘They’ being the likes of Tesco, BAA and E.ON, all members of the 18-strong Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (CLG). Their call for government action to achieve “deep and rapid” carbon cuts was promptly denounced by Greenpeace as “hypocrisy of a previously unknown magnitude”.

How dare companies intent on expanding airports and coal power have the gall to say such things, thundered the activists. In the words of a Greenpeace spokesman: “it makes an environmentalist’s jaw drop.”

Dispensing moral outrage on cue is part of Greenpeace’s job description, of course, but in this case it might just be a knee jerk too far. Because all the CLG is doing, in effect, is echoing campaigners’ demands for tough government action.

Even some of the vocabulary is the same, with dire warnings against putting your faith in “incremental change”.

So what are these companies supposed to do? Pretend their activities have no impact? Put out a tide of greenwash? Defy their fiduciary duty by cutting out every shred of unsustainable business and then piously go bust? Get real…

In some ways they look less like hypocrites, more like a queue of turkeys at a polling station, eagerly waiting to cast their ballot in favour of an early Christmas. At the very least, they’re showing a touching faith in their ability to reinvent their businesses as completely climate-friendly – should the government actually wake up and respond to their call. (A cynic could be forgiven for thinking that the chances of it doing this are so slight that the chief exec of BAA could march up and down Whitehall with a banner saying “Flying:

48 Green Futures October 2008

It’s Plane Stupid!”, for all the harm it would do him.)

But the truly striking aspect of the CLG statement is that, to all intents and purpose, they’re finally admitting what the likes of Greenpeace have said for years: that voluntary action will never be enough, and that business needs the firm hand of government to force it to do the right thing.

In effect, these companies are asking the politicians to save them from themselves.

It’s not the first time any business has issued such a call, but it’s still pretty jaw-dropping stuff. Just not for the reasons that Greenpeace says it is…

Travailing hopefully I’m writing this on Eurostar as it races over the flat and featureless plains of northern France (scenery made for speed, if ever there was), en route to Brussels. It’s costing me around £70 more to go overland than it would by air. So am I a typically smug eco-angel, selflessly forking out the extra dosh to keep my green halo intact?

Am I hell.

I’m travelling like this for two reasons: i) it’s simpler, calmer and a lot more comfortable; and ii) I get more work done.

“

So what are these companies supposed to do? Go piously bust?

Get real

”

At first glance, that last statement looks odd. Surely the plane would get there faster, so I’d have more time to work?

Not as such. Factor in the hours it takes to get to the airport, add in the endless crawl through security, the wait for the luggage at the other end, followed by the long journey into town.

Then consider the fact that the flight is so short there’s hardly time to open the laptop before you’re briskly reminded that “all electronic devices must be switched off during take off and landing”. (Which is probably just as well, considering the near certainty that at some point your neighbour’s elbow will propel his cheap red wine and complimentary nuts all over your meticulously-compiled but unsaved spreadsheet.)

Add it all up, and you have several hours of tedium laced with occasional stress.

By comparison, trains are a mobile oasis of peace and productivity, especially if you opt for the quiet carriage, leave your dongle in your bag – and resist the urge to text hourly proof of your continued existence to colleagues and friends.

Martin Wright is Editor (at Large) of Green Futures.

An oasis of peace and productivity

Photo: Eurostar

T

hey are damned

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Partner viewpoint

Wet revolution To save money, carbon and reputation, businesses should start with their water meters.

Steps to saving water Calculate Establish and benchmark your water consumption Check Pinpoint and fix leaks; reduce excessive water pressure Cut down Fit water-efficient appliances; use restrictors on taps or plugs in washbasins; lag pipes; put free ‘Save-a-flush’ devices in toilet cisterns Change Educate employees in using less water and establish maintenance programmes Communicate Monitor reductions in use and report on success Wheel of fortune

Photo: Charles Knox/iStock

A

ll but the most blinkered

of corporate giants have grasped the strategic value of cutting carbon dioxide emissions. But another key issue is now filtering through to the business agenda: water use.

Helen Chapman, water efficiency analyst at Thames Water, says there are several factors motivating businesses to cut down. “For some, it’s about saving money, literally not pouring it down the drain. For others, it’s about good business: environmental management is an indicator that financial institutions increasingly look for when considering investment.”

Thames’s business customers, who together use over 20% of the water it supplies, are the focus of its new guide to sustainable water use. The publication suggests simple steps to calculating and reducing water consumption [see box] and also comes up with some attractive figures. A company can save £500 plus, for instance, by fixing a minor overflowing toilet cistern – which could be losing about 350 cubic metres of water a year.

Water efficiency not only translates into pounds but into carbon efficiency too. “Using less water means less needs to be treated and put into supply – it saves money, resources and energy,” Chapman explains. Businesses can also reduce their carbon footprint by using less hot water, either in offices or industrial processes. Heating just one cubic metre of water to 60˚C from room temperature takes around 46.5kWh and emits 20kg of CO2.

www.greenfutures.org.uk

“Scale that saving up across your operations,” says Chapman, “and you can start to see how big a difference your business can make.”

Taking this one step further and working out an overall ‘water footprint’ could also give companies a clearer idea of where they need to cut back. Thames is exploring development of an online calculator to do this; as Chapman points out, “it’s a very complex area”.

Getting employees to change the way they use water at work is another key area covered in the guide. Behaviour may be more difficult to influence than simple technological fixes, but Thames believes it is arguably more important.

The company has worked on behaviour change through partnerships with sports bodies, and pioneering projects on water and ethnicity with London Sustainability Exchange [see ‘Mosque with a mission’, GF63, p30]. Its latest venture involves persuading London businesses to change attitudes towards tap water across the capital.

London on Tap (www.londonontap.org), launched earlier this year with the then mayor Ken Livingstone and a range of partners, encourages restaurants, bars and hotels to offer tap water to customers. The idea is to help break down the idea that we should all be asking for expensive bottled brands [see ‘Raising the bar for water’ for one London restaurant’s take on this, GF68, p13]. “Tap water is the clear choice here,” says Chapman.

“As well as being among the best quality and best tasting in the world, it costs less than a

tenth of a penny per litre, is up to 500 times cheaper than bottled water, and is kinder to the environment, emitting around 300 times less CO2 to process than bottled alternatives.”

To help spread the message, the campaign is launching an iconic carafe for the tables of London’s watering holes. More than a hundred designs were entered in a competition that’s to be judged in December.

Meanwhile, Thames has been improving its own water management in the capital.

Following massive investment, the company has beaten its target on minimising leakage for two successive years, and now loses 20% less water in London than it did four years ago.

“This is all part of a bigger and increasingly important picture,” Chapman says. “It’s about encouraging and enabling businesses to become more responsible users of water, saving money and sharing their achievements with the wider world.”

Gone are the days when saving water was seen as a green gesture; it should be part of any business’s calculations.

Darren Towers is sustainability strategy manager at Thames Water.

Thames Water is a Forum for the Future partner. www.thameswater.co.uk

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