The report seeks to establish a framework better defining sustainability and putting forward key indicators across social and human capital, natural capital and economic capital. It is largely presented as a benchmark report to be refined and reported against over time, and with the Sustainable AUstralia Report due in 2015.

Its 266 pages will take time to fully digest and that is a risk. As with some State-of-the-Environment reports, when such documents are too complex and large to be accessible and contain timely data, they can be overwhelming.   

The article by Equilibrium’s Nick Harford seeks to expand awareness of the complexity of the issue and the degrees of potentially positive and negative impacts that are best understood to achieve optimal environmental and financial outcomes. 

The changes impact organisations operating the Scheme, not how it is delivered to the public. Most notable is the proposal to create one product class so organisations do not have to meet separate targets for recycling TVs and computers but all collected and recycled materials will contribute towards achieving targets.

The proposals are in a discussion paper available at http://www.environment.gov.au/settlements/waste/ewaste/index.html and comments close on 7 May 2013.

Key areas of the package include:

1. Waste and recycling infrastructure package - $250 million
2. Supporting local communities – $137.7 million
3. Combating illegal dumping – $58 million
4. Tackling litter – $20 million.

There’s no single or homogenous audience to talk to about the challenges and opportunities of sustainability and climate change. Instead there are many different actors, be they individuals making consumption choices, governments setting legislation or policy, or corporations making investment and production decisions.

All tend to make choices in isolation, but with cumulative impacts. Ecological and social problems are generally not the result of conscious or deliberate choices but the side effects of all these individual actions and decisions. It’s these unintended consequences that are causing concern: climate change, natural resource depletion, pollution, waste, land degradation, etc, etc.

Many of these big challenges will only be resolved if we are successful in persuading people to change their business practices, behaviours, lifestyles, and habits. A big challenge for consultants such as ourselves!

Behavioural theories are being deployed to good effect in some areas. Incentives, education, social norms, emotional appeals, barrier removal, regulation – these are just some of the tools that researchers and practitioners have at their disposal to influence behaviour. To realise their full potential, we have to continue building our understanding of what does actually influence behaviour. These theories can help achieve better outcomes for government, corporations and citizens, either by complementing established tools, or by suggesting more innovative interventions.

Susan Michie, a Professor of Health Psychology from University College London (UCL), was in town recently on behalf of BehaviourWorks.

In her presentation, Professor Michie outlined a framework that provides researchers and practitioners with effective means to design behaviour change interventions. The “Behaviour Change Wheel” offers practical guidance on what we need to know about behaviour and the audience we want to change. With this knowledge, we can then be more strategic in our choice of intervention tools for more effective outcomes.

Her full presentation can be seen here

Shane Gladigau

Desai and Co. used the lessons from the design, construction and monitoring of BedZED to develop One Planet Living, which is BioRegional’s approach to community development and was also used as the framework to create the sustainability platform of the London 2012 Olympics. 

The One Planet Living framework takes account of the planet’s productive capacity through ecological footprinting, with the ultimate goal of helping reduce this growing footprint (especially in the face of rising populations and levels of affluence leading to great consumption of resources). The One Planet approach is guided by 10 core principles:

• Zero carbon: making buildings more energy efficient and delivering all energy with renewable technologies.
• Zero waste: reducing waste, reusing where possible, and ultimately sending zero waste to landfill.
• Sustainable transport: encouraging low carbon modes of transport to reduce emissions, reducing the need to travel.
• Sustainable materials: using sustainable healthy products, with low embodied energy, sourced locally, made from renewable or waste resources.
• Local and sustainable food: choosing low impact, local, seasonal and organic diets and reducing food waste.
• Sustainable water: using water more efficiently in buildings and in the products we buy; tackling local flooding and water course pollution.
• Land and wildlife: protecting and restoring biodiversity and natural habitats through appropriate land use and integration into the built environment.
• Culture and community: reviving local identity and wisdom; supporting and participating in the arts.
• Equity and local economy: creating bioregional economies that support fair employment, inclusive communities and international fair trade.
• Health and happiness: encouraging active, sociable, meaningful lives to promote good health and well-being.

The intent of these principles is to help make sustainable living easy and affordable for all so that we begin to live and work within a fair share of the planet’s resources instead of over-consuming as we currently are. According to Desai, BedZED has been able to reduce its ecological footprint to half, as well as creating a real sense of place and community.

BedZED provides an indicator as to how we may well be living in the 21^st century. Some other examples related to the built environment that are incorporating Desai’s principles are:

Sonoma Mountain Village, California

Masdar City, Abu Dhabi

WestWyck Ecovillage, Melbourne

It’s not just communities that can use the One Planet Living principles however. Businesses are also beginning to integrate these principles into their DNA. Linfox, the largest privately owned logistics company in Australia, has more than 3.8 million square meters of warehousing and nearly 5,000 vehicles across 10 countries. It also has a serious commitment to becoming a sustainable company and is using the One Planet Living principles to achieve it.

Cundall is a specialist ESD consultant in the built environment. It has set itself a vision using the One Planet Living framework for a more sustainable future, including public commitments and challenging targets that they will report against.

For more information about One Planet Australia see here

Shane Gladigau

At the request of the US intelligence community, the National Research Council was commissioned to “to evaluate the evidence on possible connections between climate change and U.S. national security concerns and to identify ways to increase the ability of the intelligence community to take climate change into account in assessing political and social stresses with implications for U.S. national security.”

The resulting report, Climate and Social Stress: implications for security analysis indicates that accelerating climate change will place unparalleled strains on American military and intelligence agencies in coming years by causing ever more disruptive events around the globe.Clusters of apparently unrelated events exacerbated by a warming climate will create more frequent but unpredictable crises in water supplies, food markets, energy supply chains and public health systems, leading to internal instability or international conflicts.

The report recommends that all government agencies must improve their ability to monitor the global climate and assess the risks to populations and critical resources around the world to help clarify what lies ahead as greenhouse heating continues.

With the IPCC’s fifth assessment report due in 2013-4, which, it’s been said will  “scare the wits out of everyone”, expect the spotlight on climate change, and sustainability more broadly, to increase.

Businesses must be aware of what’s happening in this space. Sustainability challenges us to make decisions that simultaneously improve the economy, the community and the environment. However, these challenges may seem far outside the scope of many people’s responsibility in the work place – why should a business take time to examine its impacts on these complex ‘feel good’ issues? This is why government and businesses of all description, engage the services of specialist firms like Equilibrium.

Think of sustainability as a wide-angle lens. It helps you to see beyond your normal field of vision to take in potential threats and opportunities that you might otherwise miss. In a global, hyper-connected world, what happens elsewhere can affect you.

There are major trends in the world related to climate change and sustainability that are forcing a re-think of business-as-usual models. These trends have momentum. Examining them, even those that at first may not appear to have any relevance, and using this knowledge to direct a long-term strategy enables you to position your organisation to avoid the worst of the impacts and benefit most from new opportunities that can be identified.

Shane Gladigau

In their short-term appointments, will they be prepared to tackle some of the biggest long-term challenges confronting us?  Obama, to his credit, at least touched on the topic of climate change in his acceptance speech.

We’ve just seen the devastating impacts of “Superstorm Sandy” and while there is reluctance to blame the storm on climate change directly, the consensus among scientists is that such events around the globe will become more frequent.

An article in The Age recently quoted Yvo de Boer, the UN climate chief during the 2009 Copenhagen climate change talks (and now special global advisor on climate change for KPMG) the next UN climate report will “scare the wits out of everyone”. The IPCC’s fifth assessment report is due to be published in late 2013 and early 2014.

Another of the Big Four consulting firms recently warned business to prepare for catastrophic change.  According to the report, investors and businesses with assets or infrastructure, particularly in coastal or low-lying regions, need to take the pessimistic scenarios seriously. Sectors dependent on food, water, energy or ecosystem services need to scrutinise the resilience and viability of their supply chains. More carbon-intensive sectors need to anticipate more invasive regulation and the possibility of stranded assets.

Scientists, economists (and consultants) love using models to make future predictions, despite the use of assumptions that tend to make such predictions imperfect. It is impossible to fully know what the future holds. Still, having some idea is better than having no idea and models at the least enable us to visualise what could potentially become the real thing. It allows forward thinking decisions and investments to be made today that will influence where we end up tomorrow.

Over the past four decades human endeavour has unleashed unprecedented economic growth. With the world’s population rising by more than 3 billion since 1970, the size of the world economy has more than tripled, pulling millions out of poverty. However, this growth has been uneven and at significant cost to the environment. The UN is projecting further population growth of 2 billion by 2050, mostly in developing countries. By then, it’s projected that nearly 70%of the world population will be living in urban areas.

This will magnify challenges related to energy requirements, air pollution, transport congestion and the management of waste and water, with serious consequences for human health. Will the planet’s resource base support these ever-increasing demands for energy, food, water and other natural resources, while at the same time continue absorbing our waste streams and carbon pollution?

Climate change, coupled with these inescapable challenges of the 21^st century will bring winners and losers.  For example, Fairfax economics editor, Ross Gittins, writing in The SMH said, “the first thing to realise about the rise of Asia is that our farmers are about to join our miners in the winners’ circle. The second is that climate change and other environmental problems may greatly limit our farmers’ ability to exploit this opportunity.”

Humans have adapted, innovated and changed in the face of dire predictions before, and we will keep doing it so long as we keep reading the sign posts. Now, more than ever, is the time for all businesses to address their environmental footprints and to become part of the solution, nor part of the problem. if you don’t know where to begin, engage a consultant to help with understanding this rapidly changing landscape.

The costs of inaction could be huge, both in economic and human terms. What contribution are the leaders of the two most powerful nations on Earth going to make?

Shane Gladigau

I’m not a scientist, but I certainly trust them. While the research is unfinished and gaps in knowledge remain to be filled, the evidence climate scientists are putting forward seems sufficient to justify greater precautionary action. The chance of significant warming over time is high, as is the damage it will do.

Each year, there are climatic events that represent risks to people and organisations. These risks arise from normal day-to-day, seasonal and year-to-year variability in climate as well as regional climate differences. However, when managing climate variability on their operations in the future, organisations cannot simply rely on the assumption that the prevailing climate will be more or less the same as it was over the past fifty or one hundred years. Escalating climate change is likely to invalidate this assumption.

The open question is whether Hurricane Sandy and other events (eg. see NASA’s images showing the remarkable degree to which Greenland’s ice cap has melted much more than normal this year)  will bring climate change back onto the agenda for coordinated international action? Probably not. Global economic conditions remain weak. And climate change is “tomorrow’s” issue, a subject that remains a vague concern for the majority, and on which action is all too easily postponed for another day.  It feels like the current political climate will see mitigation policies remain too slow to prevent increasing average global temperatures.

It means that we have to prepare for a world in which climate changes, and in ways that are wild and unpredictable (“global weirding”, as Paul Gilding calls it). What’s clear with Sandy, Yasi, Katrina, wild fires and flooding, is that such changes are not a remote prospect which might occur in the second half of this century, but is affecting different parts of the world right now. Stepping up mitigation efforts obviously remains critical, but adaptation is an increasing imperative.

What’s this mean for business? Effective adaptation by the individual organisation to this big picture issue requires an awareness of the risks posed by the challenges of climate change, and importantly, an understanding of the relative significance of those risks. Organisations need to take a measured and systematic approach to the impacts of climate change, involving the careful examination and understanding of issues and risks affecting the market and the development of appropriate short and long-term strategies.

However, many organisations still lack the internal awareness, skills and tools to perform these critical steps. Seeking the expertise of a quality consulting firm – such as Equilibrium – will help clarify potential scenarios and assist with the development of suitable strategies.

Those who respond early and appropriately will likely survive and prosper. Those who respond inappropriately – or ignore the problem altogether – run the risk of paying a greater cost: financial, reputational, or even the very existence of their organisation.

Shane Gladigau

It will help you avoid known pitfalls and issues that can result in unsustainable outcomes and have a negative impact on your business reputations and brands.

Equilibrium has partnered with pulp and paper market intelligence experts IndustryEdge to produce the Guide. It covers the widest possible range of sustainability issues, supplying both minimum and known best practice criteria. It includes commentary drawn from our team’s extensive consulting experience. It does not refer to or recommend any particular products or manufacturers.

Focus in this Guide is on printing and communication papers. A companion Guide will shortly be released for the tissue sector, which is similar, but has some important differences.

Individual copies are just AUD100 (plus GST in Australia) per copy, with multiple copies available at discount rates.

More information here