Rod Oram gave a presentation to 350.org.nz about sustainability and the rise of civil society. He discussed how the economic crisis required a big, slow fix rather than a quick one. He talked about growing risks, social unrest, and exceeding environmental limits. Oram also covered commitments made at sustainability summits, voluntary actions by organizations, and the rise of civil society as a new form of democracy.

1. Rod Oram’s presentation to
350.org.nz’s Auckland house-warming
November 28th, 2012
Making our Future
Sustainability and the rise of civil society
Kiwiki on Facebook / Twitter @RodOramNZ
oram@clear.net.nz / +64 21 444 839

2. Then…. …Now
•! 2007-09 •! 2009-20??
•! Sudden liquidity crisis •! Long-running structural crisis
•! Big, quick fix •! Big, slow fix
•! Pump in lots of money •! Restructure economies
•! Lots of political will •! Lack of political will
•! Lots of public support •! Lack of public support
•! Worked fast •! Will work slowly
•! Markets re-assured •! Markets fearful
•! Moved on to current phase •! Very, very stuck

3. World Economic Forum:
Global risks
• To ensure human needs are met,
we need radical new technologies
• We need to develop and deploy
them on a scale and at a speed
like never before
• …and with much greater
complexity and risk
• …and with a need for public
understanding and support
• …and ways to respond far better
when things go wrong
• This is a fundamental shift in
risk and risk management

4. WEF:
Risk map

5. WEF: seeds of dystopia
• …e.g. is The Occupy Movement an anomaly?
• Or a harbinger of social unrest?
• ...the latter, it concluded

8. Over the limit

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11. Rio 1992 – main outcomes
• Governments agreed on 27 sustainability principles
• Breakthrough…bringing sharp focus to humankind’s unsustainable
course
• These have helped shape some government policies…
• …and personal and community responses, and corporate strategies
• Led to the UN’s framework convention on climate change…
• …and progress in other areas such as biodiversity and Law of the
Sea
• But in the 20 years since:
• Very hard to keep up momentum, shift behaviour, implement big
changes
• Natural resource use has increased by 40% in past 20 years, UN
says
• We are changing climate, ecosystems far faster than we ever
imagined
• Injustices are accelerating
• Our lack of sustainability is now utterly critical

12. Rio 2012 – Two views
• “The fact that we have a consensus outcome document at all,
and the 283 statements within it,
is truly testament to the abilities and goodwill of everyone who attended.”
• Environment Minister Amy Adams, Aug 6, 2102
• At the Environmental Defence Society conference “Growing Green”
• What the text actually contained:
• The 283 paragraphs cruelly exposed governments’ lack of ambition &
commitment
• 99 times – “we support”
• 50 times – “we encourage”
• 5 times - “we will”
• 3 times – “we must”
• “The longest suicide note in history”
• Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace International’s executive director

13. t
• t

14. t
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15. t
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16. t
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17. t
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18. t
• t

19. The rise of civil society…
• …birth of a new democracy:
• People-led
• Not politician-led
• Locally-driven
• Not centrally controlled
• Interactive
• Not authoritarian
• Creative
• Not restrictive
• Networked
• Not hierarchical
• Learning
• Not stagnating

20. …rise of civil society
• At Rio:
• More than 700 formal commitments by organizations and companies
were registered
• They pledged more than US$500bn to sustainable development actions,
many were addressed specifically to fighting climate change.
• Examples
• The 1,800 largest companies listed on the London Stock Exchange
committed to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions
• Mayors from 58 megacities, meeting as part of the C40 Cities
Climate Leadership Group, agreed to actions which could reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by over a billion tons by 2030

21. Voluntary action
• US Natural Resource
Defense Council’s
Cloud of Commitments
• http://
www.cloudofcommitments
.org

22. Business action
• World Business Council for Sustainable Development…member commitments
• http://www.wbcsd.org/rio-20/membercommitments.aspx

23. Natural Capital
• Many global corporates committed to it at the UN’s 2012 sustainability
summit in Rio
• www.naturalcapitalproject.org

24. Sustainability - Local governments lead

25. The future of public participation

26. People, planet
• Vision 2050
• A very challenging roadmap
for corporate development by
World Business Council for
Sustainable Development
• …NZ version just released

27. Finite resources

28. w
• q

29. Innovation
How Green Will Save Us: September, 2009 edition:
There is no alternative to sustainable development.
Our research shows that sustainability is a mother lode of organisational and
technological innovations that yield both bottom-line and top-line returns…
…In fact, because those are the goals of corporate innovation, we find that
smart companies now treat sustainability as innovation’s new frontier.

30. Cradle to Cradle
• One product gives rise to the next
• …waste, by-products and recycling of one, become materials for the next
• …emulating nature’s cycles

31. Re-conceiving…footprints
• Positive footprints
• …the insight of Michael Braungart
• www.braungart.com
• If we change our technology so our
resource use benefits the ecosystem
• Then the more we consume…
…the richer the environment
• Waste = food
• Four positive footprints:
• Fabric of Airbus aircraft seats becomes compost for growing food
• Formway’s bio-plastic chair
• Carbon positive farming
• Ants vs. Humans
• Positive role in ecosystem vs.negative…how do we make it positive?

32. Ray Anderson
• Founded Interface in 1973
• …15 years later world’s largest maker of carpet tiles
• His “mid-course correction” came in 1994, when he was 60
• 2020 goal: take nothing from the earth that could not be rapidly replenished,
produce no greenhouse-gas emissions, and no waste
• By 2007 Interface was about halfway up “Mount Sustainability”
• Greenhouse-gas emissions by absolute tonnage were down 92%
• Water usage down 75%
• 74,000 tonnes of used carpet recovered from landfills
• Savings of $400m each year from no scrap and no off-quality tiles more than
paid for the R&D and process changes
• As much as 25% of the company's new material from “post-consumer recycling”
• Sales had risen by two-thirds and profits had doubled
• Ray Anderson’s Economist obituary www.economist.com/node/21528583

33. Re-conceiving…biomimicry
• Imitating nature
• …the technology discipline
pioneered by Janine Benyus
• www.biomimicry.net
• Fans, propellers like nautilus shells
• Wire ropes as strong as spider webs…
• …made in cold biochemical processes

34. Revolution
• Radical new technologies are
inverting old dynamics…e.g.
• Additive manufacturing
overturns mass production
• New materials overturn
commodity constraints
• Iterative design overturns
linear product development

35. Leader of the revolution
• The Centre for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Led by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, www.cba.mit.edu
• The first Fab Lab…machines making machines
• Science & technology road map to micron-Lego assembly…
…dis-assembly of products

36. …when information meets atoms
• Prof Neil Gershenfeld, MIT…TED talk http://bit.ly/MI7Eur

37. Integrated Reporting
• The next big initiative by
corporates and accounting
bodies
• Seeking to make financial,
environmental and social
measures…
• …much easier,
more accessible and
more useful to corporates,
investors and the public
• www.theiirc.org

38. The next 10 years
• Finance and capital conditions
• Finance more expensive and less available
• Market and regulatory constraints
• Less benign economic conditions
• Higher economic volatility; Increased risk
• Low carbon-economy
• New disciplines & technology
• Far greater resource efficiency
• Technology change accelerating
• Public losing trust in business
• Scepticism over Anglo-Saxon model
• More government intervention
“The Shape of Business”
• Social and demographic change Confederation of
• New responses to retirement, pensions British Industry
• New business & government solutions
www.cbi.org.uk
• E.g. more flexible working practices

39. …but we suffer from slowth
• We’re still recovering slowly …
…helped by rebuild of
Christchurch
• Growth in year to June 2012
was 2.0%...
..could peak at 3% next year
…dominated by Christchurch
• But will then sink back to its
long-run slow growth average
of around 2%
• Why can’t we grow faster,
longer by earning
a bigger living in the
world economy?

40. Our economy is constrained
• Despite slow growth, the economy is
constrained by e.g.
• Skills and capital shortages
• Weak business investment
• Limited government investment
• As a result “potential GDP”
(the rate at which the economy can
grow without causing inflation)
is low
• Solution: business strategies and
investment that build capacity, value,
wages…
• …to grow the economy and living
standards faster

41. Businesses are under-investing
• Recession and slow growth have been
very tough on businesses…
• …and continue to be so
• Many are hard-pressed
• Business investment remains
very low
• But big behaviour changes…
• …e.g. retaining more staff than they did
in previous recessions because of skill
shortages in the economy
• Companies need a lot of help to raise
their skills, improve their operations,
increase their resilience

42. We’re growing our exports slowly
• Government programmes and investments are not shifting the needle…
• …e.g. composition, volume and rate of growth of exports are unchanged

43. Current account
• …so our current account deficit deteriorates further

44. What we owe the world
• …likewise our net international liabilities keep getting bigger….
• …2011 an aberration driven by inflow of earthquake reinsurance payouts
• We are one of the most indebted of developed countries
• We need to earn a bigger living in the world economy…
• …Treasury forecasts no change in our performance

45. Wall
•! We’re very efficient at producing low value goods and services
•! But…we’ve hit the wall, economically, socially and environmentally

46. Government
Strategy Mk III
• “Business Growth
Agenda”
• 6 ingredients of
business growth

47. Some simple maths
• We need to double the size of the economy in 15 years in real terms
• To maintain its role, the primary sector needs to double too
• Government wants primary sector to treble…grow, say, 12%-15% a year
• The primary sector can:
• Grow volume a bit…but real physical constraints in New Zealand
• Grow productivity a bit…but historic rate of NZ agricultural productivity
increases about 2% a year
• Benefit a bit from higher world prices…but commodity prices moderated
overseas competition and politics
• Earn a bit of a premium for NZ quality and brand…but it would need to
break free from retailers’ stranglehold
• Stave off overseas competition a bit…but the competition gets ever
better on cost, volume and quality
• Government’s primary sector strategy: incremental growth of current model
• …but the primary sector’s current commodity model fails on simple maths

48. Seismic shifts…our new playing field
• Rebalancing
• From extreme deficit and surplus nations to balanced economies
• NZ: we have to borrow, spend less; invest, earn more
• Geo-political: from developed to developing countries
• We need to deepen our relationships in Asia and South America
• Demand: from consumer goods to capital goods
• But capital goods are not our strength…
• …’tho we can contribute R&D & IP to eg agriculture & clean tech
• Tougher old consumer markets a big challenge
• Reaching new markets will be hard
• Customer service: from accepting to demanding
• Finding new ways to find, listen and engage with them
• Eg social networking and other world-changing ways

49. …our new playing field
• Relationships: from transactions to partnerships
• …particularly highly strategic ones
• Innovation: from incremental to radical
• To meet new needs…in new ways
• Open innovation and other forms of collaboration
• New opportunities for NZ companies to partner with global ones
• Sustainability: from fringe to mainstream
• Measuring and managing environmental flows through our businesses
• Push down the road to true sustainability
• Management: from tactical to strategic
• Need to collect, interpret and act on real-time data
• Everything we do today is a piece of our big picture

50. NZ Vision 2050
• …by a group of young leaders…
• …under the NZ Business
Council for Sustainable
Development…
• …which morphed into
Business NZ’s
Sustainable Business Council
• Download at:
• http://bit.ly/PxiG1B
• NZ site coming soon at:
• http://
www.vision2050nz.co.nz
• Vision 2050 Global report at:
• ‪http://bit.ly/Ox0HsK

52. The green imperative…NZ’s opportunities
• Authoritative analysis from Pure Advantage
• …business research group led by Tindall,
Fyfe, Morrison, Ross, Mills and other NZ
business leaders
• Building business buy-in on
seven initiatives in existing sectors:
• Housing
• Geothermal
• Biofuels
• Waste to energy
• Smart grid
• Agriculture
• Biodiversity
• Available at www.pureadvantage.org

53. LanzaTech…clean tech leader
•! Commercialisation agreement with:
•! Chinese Academy of Sciences
•! Baosteel; next pilot plant in China
•! Makes biofuel from industrial waste gases
•! Turns greenhouse gas liability into profit
•! World pioneer of the science
•! Auckland-based; NZ Steel pilot plant
•! Big venture capital backing
•! US$100m of capital so far
•! NZ: Stephen Tindall
•! US: Vinod Khosla
•! Chinese and Malaysian investors too

54. NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre
• Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases
• Proposed by NZ government at Copenhagen in 2009…to:
• Reduce emissions; increase food production
• Help developing countries to join global climate change frameworks
• Alliance now has 36 countries + 3 observers including the EU
• = 70% of global agricultural GHGs; agriculture = 15% of total GHGs
• Three main workgroups:
• Livestock, led by NZ and Netherlands, 483 projects identified to-date
• Croplands, led by US, 429 projects to-date
• Paddy Rice, led by Japan, 60 projects to-date
• Secretariat: NZ
• NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre: $48.5m over 10 years
• Four main workstreams: Mitigate methane; mitigate nitrous oxide;
increase soil carbon; deliver farming solutions

55. Our opportunity
• 1 litre of milk = 940 gm of CO2 equivalent
16,000,000,000 litres = 15,040,000,000 kg of CO2 eq
• 15.04m tonnes of CO2 eq per year is not a waste product, a liability
Closing the nutrient cycle…
is a brilliant business opportunity…
healthier cows and soil…
= more food

56. Community
• Issues are increasingly global….solutions are increasingly local
• Solutions require very strong, learning communities
• Some attributes:
• Common sense
• Common purpose
• Common wealth
• Places where individuals are valued, helped, encouraged
• …in return, they participate, change
• Challenges:
• Help communities articulate, visualise, realise their dreams
• Create local solutions to global issues
• Build support for bigger shifts
• Push governments to do more, better, faster
• Energise support for very big global shifts…fast

57. Voluntary action e.g. Hikurangi Foundation
• “NZ’s incubator for low carbon social innovation” e.g. community wind farms
• …& Rod’s Rio blog www.hikurangi.org.nz/2012/06/19/rod-orams-blog-from-rio-20/

58. Paradox
Abundance Scarcity

59. Poverty
Cows Scientists

60. Poverty
Tourists Engagement

61. Poverty
Sustainability
Weak Strong

62. Re-invention
Scarcity Abundance

63. Wealth
Lacto-pharmaceuticals
Milk powder

64. Wealth
Travellers Tourists

65. Wealth
Sustainability
Strong Weak

66. Learning to thrive on complexity
• Our world is getting extraordinarily complex
• We need to teach ourselves and our children how to deal with complexity…
• …how to thrive on it
• We can be good at this…as a small nation we have to be:
• We’re skilled generalists
• We’re multi-taskers with knowledge & experience across a range of
functions
• Creative, fast-moving, self-starting, team-working
• Not expert specialists
• Narrow skills; working in silos; hard to co-ordinate
• Typical of large companies overseas
• Impact in business
• On our companies:
• Makes them quick, innovative, lateral thinkers
• On multinationals:
• NZ subsidiaries pioneer new skills, products to take globally

67. …but we’re dumbing down
• …in lots of ways
• For example…
• …rather than learning to deal better and more efficiently with complex
economic and ecosystem issues, the government is stripping out
essential tools from the Local Government Act, the RMA and the EEZ
Act (regulating economic activity in our oceans)
• This simplification will impoverish us…economically, environmentally,
socially and culturally

68. Poverty
Simplicity Complexity

69. Poverty
LGA, RMA, EEZ Society

70. Wealth
Complexity Simplicity

71. Wealth
Society.....................LGA, RMA, EEZ

72. Our future…and the
ultimate complexity
• NZ Land: 270,000 sq km
• Australia’s 28x NZ
• NZ Oceans: 5.8m sq km
• 5th largest in the world
• Australia’s 1.4x NZ’s
• Huge responsibility:
• …to nurture
• …to use responsibly
• …to sustain us
• …we get $184bn of ecosystem
services for free
• We need new values, systems,
learning, collaboration:
• …to be sustainable
• …to offer hope to the world

73. …Johnny Rotten:
“You’ll have no future…
…if you don’t make one
for yourself”

74. …Johnny Rotten:
“You’ll have no future…
…if you don’t make one
for yourself”