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Sunday, February 16, 2014

Reflecting on levels of change

      Recently I've been reading a series of threads about climate change in which people are asking questions about what it would take for their international organisation to develop a shared understanding of the significance of climate change and a collective sense of appropriate actions to take. 
      It's been fascinating.
      At present I'm just ruminating about the many different levels on which action can take place - and where it is and where it isn't taking place. It seems to me at this stage of my ruminations that actions can be individual and collective, and also at different scales. 
      At the individual scale, the scale of ordinary people, plenty of committed individuals are already taking action, whether it's on one front like cycling in preference to using a private car, or on many fronts, such as also growing their own vegetables, being as energy and water efficient as they can, reducing their purchase of new items and minimising the amount of solid waste they create. These actions do make a difference and better still, they also encourage others to do the same - not least in the sense of overcoming the all-too-human tendency to apathy, cynicism and despair in the face of an issue that just seems too big. In many places we see groups of such individuals coming together in collective action like creating farmers markets and setting up Transition Towns. These also can make a substantial difference in reduced carbon emissions.
      At the institutional scale, again we see that growing numbers of institutions both public and private, are doing everything they can to reduce their own carbon footprint and be as socially, ecologically and financially responsible as they possibly can. They might also take some form of collective action by joining a responsible business association, working along their own supply chain or working with other institutions in their local geographical community. 
      At the sector scale, we can see examples of collective action by institutions working together with others in their sector, for example, green offices, green retail, green paper manufacturing, green shipping and the rest - each sector working with others to address the issues and opportunities they all face. This magnifies the results of their members' individual efforts.
      Still larger groups of institutions form at the global scale, with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and many, many more.
      One major sector that seems to be missing in action at both the individual and collective scale is government. Some individual governments are looking at using indicators of sustainable development and happiness indices - but for the vast majority, it's GDP and growth-focused business as usual. And of course we repeatedly witness failures of governance at the international scale when it comes to climate change treaty efforts.
      This is immensely frustrating when it's clear that governments can make a difference: when they raise the bar for environmental compliance, the result is innovation. As Michael Porter and Claas van der Linde said in a 1995 Harvard Business Review article, "How an industry responds to environmental problems may be a leading indicator in its overall competitiveness ... Only those companies that innovate successfully will win. A truly competitive industry is more likely to take up a new standard as a challenge and respond to it with innovation."
       Perhaps after all Paul Hawken was right when he famously said, in his 1992 book, The Ecology of Commerce, "Business is the only mechanism powerful enough to reverse global environmental and social degradation."
      Individuals and institutions are doing it. When will our governments catch up, and bring the groundswell of unwilling players up to the peak of the wave that the best of us are surfing?

      

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