Best Employer Award

Imogen Martineau, September 21st 2007, General

Our suspicions have been confirmed. We're officially the Best Employer in the Third Sector.

That's according to Third Sector magazine, which chose us as winners of the award for Best Employer at the Third Sector Awards dinner last night.

The gala dinner at The Hurlingham Club was attended by nearly 1000 representatives from the voluntary sector. Awards were presented by Hugh Dennis.

The judges were said to be particularly impressed by the 'Forum Challenge' - a week on full pay that staff can use to do something that will enhance their personal development, help another organisation or promote Forum for the Future’s mission.

Examples of recent challenges include tree planting, being a trustee for a charity and writing an academic paper.

They also highlighted our policy of paying staff 20p for each mile they cycle for meetings, and commended our Chief Executive, Peter Madden, for hot-desking around our offices in London and Cheltenham.

Finally, feedback from staff collected through the staff survey proved to the judges that our approach really works:

“Forum is one of the friendliest environments I have worked in and people have time for a laugh.”

“Respect is given to everyones opinion - there always appears to be the chance to 'have your say'.”

“There is no doubt at all that everyone at the Forum is working together towards the shared aim of a more sustainable world.”

“In the last six months I have received more training than six years in my former job. I'm grateful to be part of an organisation that values its employees and recognises the value of investing in their skills.”

“We're not perfect, but still so much better than anywhere else I have worked.”

Forum for the Future was also nominated for Best Brand Development.

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Welcome to our new website

Joy Green, October 13th 2007, General

It's great to be able to welcome you to our new and much expanded website! We hope that you'll add us to your list of favourites - or subscribe to our RSS feed.

This is the place where you can find cutting edge thinking, alongside practical sustainable development projects and inspiring case studies. We've pulled together the information on all our work and partners and the site gives you plenty of opportunities to join in the debate and comment on what's happening.

There's also free access to all of Green Futures - including its vast archive - so feel free to read and send articles to colleagues, friends and family.

Most of all, we hope the site will encourage and enthuse you in whatever part you play in creating a sustainable future.

Enjoy!

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Work for us!

Joy Green, November 19th 2007, General

If you fancy being employed by the official Best Employer in the Third Sector, now's your chance...

We're recruiting for two great new senior posts on our Public Sector team - Head of public sector leadership and change, and Principal sustainability advisor.

If you like the sound of either of those, head to our Jobs section for more details.

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Reconnections 2008

Imogen Martineau, March 6th 2008, General

For some it would be the holiday of a lifetime - five days in the heart of the English countryside, a great group of people to pass the time with, fantastic walks, stimulating talks and the chance get back to nature.

But this isn't a holiday. This is a carefully crafted training course on sustainable development, led by Jonathon Porritt, designed specifically for senior level staff in both public and private sector organisations.

It's called Reconnections.

Reconnections provides a unique opportunity to step away from the day to day tasks at the office and engage with the bigger questions about what you're doing, why and how.

It's a chance to think about the things that really matter, such as ethics and values, and often marks a giant leap forwards in participants' professional and personal lives. Find out more and sign up here.

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New starters

Deborah Fox, March 11th 2008, General

I'd like to introduce myself as the new Director of Forum for the Future's Public Sector Programme. Those of you who know the programme may be aware that there has been some considerable change in staffing recently. It may be famous last words but I like to think this is coming to an end and that the team and their partners and contacts can look forward to some stability in the coming months and years.

Starting out with a degree in Botany and doing a Masters in Medieval History, my route to the Forum for the Future has been as convoluted as our other staff. My experiences range from leading teams of volunteers in transforming post-industrial Teesside to a stretch with Friends of the Earth where I provided support for 50 campaigning groups across the north of England. A key success was a campaign to save Thorne and Hatfield Moors, one of the last surviving lowland raised peat moors in the UK.

As a regional director with ENCAMS I worked in partnership with local authorities and utility companies and brought the Blue Flag back to the beaches in Yorkshire & the Humber. Then as its development director I set funding strategy for programmes like Eco-Schools in the UK and steered a Pathfinder programme with 27 councils for Defra.

Nearly five years as a head of service at CABE, where I dished out generous advice when government wished to receive it and enjoyed meeting a succession of parks ministers, brings me to my current role at the Forum.

The other recent appointments in the team are key to the Forum's success in the public sector.

Karen Lawrence comes to Forum for the Future as principle advisor on climate change. Karen joins us from LACORS, a local government central body, where she was policy officer, promoting tighter vehicular NOX emissions as well as a climate change toolkit for regulatory services. As with many other staff at Forum for the Future she has a fascinating background that means she knows the language of the public sector, can recognise a dodgy building (even if it is a low carbon one) and understands that communications are key to our success.

The Forum’s role of Head of Leadership and Change could have been written for Anna Birney. Roles such as project manager for the Pathways to Change programme at WWF and being part of the management group for Local 4 Global (an unincorporated consortium part-funded by DFID, HEC and RISC) stand her in great stead. Anna has such a charisma and enthusiasm that makes it difficult not to change spontaneously on contact with her.

Last, and by no means least, Zoe Abrahamson demonstrates how the Forum walks the walk, in being a PA with a masters degree in sustainable development. She has the dubious task of plotting my movements and those of deputy director Helen Clarkson and providing core administrative support to the team.

I very much look forward to being part of shaping Forum for the Future’s public sector programme and creating exciting change for the sector.

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A green budget?

Ben Tuxworth, March 13th 2008, General

As of this morning, the consensus amongst commentators seems to be that the Chancellor’s budget was not the ecofest we were promised. From the first reactions from opposition leaders (a green cop out, according to Clegg) to the morning after grumbling of the green groups, to the wry summaries of the media pundits and vox-pops, no-one seems to think we got much more than a shrug in the direction of ‘the greatest challenge facing humanity’. Those 15 mentions of the environment were, it seems, just convenient cover for a taxation drive to fill the hole in government finances.

Certainly, if you were hoping for bold action on the challenge of environmental limits, best not to hold your breath. Perhaps stung by recent criticism from the parliamentary environmental audit committee, who claimed the government had shown a lack of ambition and imagination on environmental tax reform, there were some small steps in the right direction. The chancellor is fashionably down on plastic bags, gas guzzlers and flying. He offered the threat of new legislation to reduce the number of bags in circulation by around 12 billion, to be introduced in 2009 if voluntary schemes aren’t working by then. He announced the end of Air Passenger Duty and a new tax per flight scheme from November 09, promising this would increase the revenue from flying by 10% during 2010. He launched the much covered ‘showroom tax’ on the most polluting vehicles – of £950 – which nearly put me off buying that new Hummer - but won’t come into effect until 2010. And of course the two pence per litre increase on the tax on fuel to go with it, but postponed until October – because of high energy prices.

Leaving aside the inadequate scale of these measures, the delays and the lack of intent to manage demand are more worrying pointers. Putting off a tax on fuel use until it is affordable is a very strange way of using it to reduce consumption. And why is increased revenue from air travel in any way green if it is not intended to dent the expansion of the industry and negate the need for those new runways?

Beyond some allusion to paying for environmental costs, there wasn‘t much about how this budget is expected to change behaviour. No plan, apparently, to use the boosted revenues on the sort of measures proposed by Friends of the Earth, for stamp duty and council tax rebates for household renewables and energy efficiency; a premium feed-in-tarriff for those selling energy back to the grid; or a billion pound low carbon buildings programme. Greenpeace are predictably hacked off that all that ‘subsidy’ of the aviation sector isn’t being channelled into the railways. And there’s no sign of the windfall tax on energy companies that might have been hypothecated to tackle fuel poverty. Some measures even seem contradictory: concerned about declining extraction rates in the North sea, the chancellor has reconfigured the taxation regime to help oil and gas companies invest in new production facilities.

Sustainability isn’t just about the environment, and the Chancellor did have something to offer on the social front, with measures apparently aimed at tackling the familiar ills of poverty and drinking. The Child Poverty Action group was reasonably optimistic about one announcement – a renewed commitment to the government’s target to halve child poverty by 2010, and nearly £1.7bn to do it with, though it’s put in perspective by a much less widely discussed extra £2bn for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Excise duty on beer, wine and spirits is set to rise by 6% above inflation – giving the budget one of its few superlatives in the biggest monetary rise on alcohol duty since the 1970s. Public health professionals are yet to be convinced that this will stem the tide – and rising costs – of binge drinking, but there is at least reasonable evidence of a link between affordability and consumption, so perhaps this is a genuine attempt to manage demand.

So does it all add up to a credible package? From the department of government with perhaps the most wilfully unjoined up approach to sustainability it is predictably patchy, even contradictory at times. Glimmers of hope on demand management are welcome, it seems we are still a long way off any real ambition on either the environment or sustainable development, let alone 80% cuts in carbon emissions.

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Can we afford to wait for the IPCC reports?

Hugh Knowles, March 17th 2008, General

It is time to consider whether the IPCC reporting process has a fatal flaw. Could the verification and reporting process be accentuating scientific reticence and hiding the true picture of climate change? If so, the reports coming from this well respected organisation may well be too conservative for the formation of effective policy on climate change.

The IPCC regularly produce hugely valuable reports synthesising current climate science. Yet the four year reporting schedule and extensive deliberation process mean that the science is already out of date by the time the report is published. We are rapidly discovering that the processes involved in climate change are rarely linear and are moving far faster than anticipated. Therefore the lag time between submission and publication could be disastrous.

The climate change science that is currently in the pipeline, and will feed into the next IPCC report, is presenting us with a very different picture from that in the IPCC 4th synthesis - which is informing the formation of current policy.

For example:

• Arctic sea ice retreat is larger than in any of the 19 IPCC models.
• Positive feedback mechanisms could lead to an ice-free Arctic by summer 2013. This would be about 100 years ahead of the IPCC predictions.
• The estimates made in the IPCC on climate sensitivity also seem to be conservative (Climate sensitivity refers to the expected increase in global temperatures from a doubling in concentration of GHGs from pre-industrial levels of 280ppm). The IPCC assumes a 3-degree rise. Recent research suggests that it could be as high as 6 degrees. Therefore reaching 550ppm would result in catastrophic change. The 3-degree figure does not take into account a number of feedbacks in the climate system.
• The ability of our ecosystem to absorb CO2 appears to have been overestimated. The amount of CO2 taken out of the air by natural carbon sinks, such as the ocean, is falling.

The extensive melting of the Arctic sea ice in the summer 2007 has demonstrated that the impacts of serious climate change are probably already here and far sooner than expected. This has raised questions about the speed at which the Greenland ice sheet could melt. It is very difficult to model, but the science is pointing to the possibility of positive feedbacks in the system causing a rapid non-linear collapse. This would make the IPCC 2007 predictions of 18-59cm sea level rise by 2100 woefully inadequate.

Whilst the uncertainties in climate change science are inevitably large, an increasing body of evidence demands that we consider worse case outcomes and not just average scenarios. We can no longer afford to wait 4 years for this science to be filtered through the IPCC and brought to wider attention. The limits of the IPCC reporting model have to be immediately understood by policy makers and business leaders.

For a summary of the latest climate change science and references for the science mentioned above please see the excellent Climate Code Red report here.

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Web-based services have got me thinking

Deborah Fox, March 31st 2008, General

Sparked off by a particularly interesting panel session at the recent Guardian Public Sector Summit, I started listing the possible environmental benefits of investing more public money in these technologies – from better home delivery services and reduced car use, to savings in town hall energy and water consumption, and cutting down on paper waste by emailing council tax bills rather than sending them out in the post.

It might also improve some of our point-of-contact services. Recently, as a relative recounted the ‘joys’ of their visit to the job centre, I was struck by the similarities to my own nightmare encounters as a student, made worse by desperate employees whose only concern was to get home before Neighbours (yes, the first series). Surely a small piece of interactive software could do a better job?

But then I thought about the possible social consequences of a rush to web-based services.

I doubt the closure of local job centres would provoke a furore on the scale currently sweeping my borough, where campaigns are being mounted to save four post offices. But it’s likely that losing other face-to-face public services would cause considerable distress to many, particularly those for whom they’re a reason to get out and about and make contact with other people.

There are also risks in reconciling the push to run our lives online with data protection issues. In the Guardian Summit workshop a great story was told about an automatic mail-out of free travel passes to the over-60s, which backfired because people hadn’t told their partners their real age!

The main problems, though, are the access and inclusion issues – for disabled people, and indeed for anyone who finds the technology a barrier in itself. Not everyone has a personal computer or the skills to use one. Even for middle-class, middle-income, laptop-owning and reasonably literate me, my experiences of web-based services have often left me wanting to throw my computer out of the window. A mix-up trying to cancel travel tickets online when my friend and her family were struck down with norovirus has cost me £60. And when applying for a job, I couldn’t do it online because the form came in PDF format (who owns Adobe’s software at home?). So with the end of the last day for application looming I had to fax it page by page. I wasn’t successful – luckily, or I wouldn’t now be working at Forum for the Future.

There are lessons here for the public sector. Yes, there are financial savings and environmental benefits to be gained from doing more stuff online. But if there’s a social price to pay then public sector managers should beware the easy, off-the-shelf, one-size-fits-all techno-fix.

This article also appears in Green Futures

Deborah Fox is Forum for the Future's new public sector porogramme director. 

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Innovation with that 'wow' factor

Chris Sherwin, April 1st 2008, General

Innovation’s the lifeblood of the mainstream business world. Sustainability advocates are starting to give it a central role in their work too. Think ‘sustainable innovation’, though, and you might struggle for examples. So take a deep breath and think again, and into your mind’s eye might float images like BedZED, the Prius, or the PruHealth insurance that pays your gym membership fees.

Innovations like these don’t just come fully fledged to the market. A whole bunch of other stuff has to happen, often commencing years before. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the glamorous world of innovation process and method…

At Forum for the Future, we’re doing more and more work behind the scenes on practical innovation, sharing lessons between partners, sectors and industries, and encouraging further innovation for sustainability. Here are just three of the recent trends in the field that are making us say ‘wow’:

Targeting innovation – a raft of major companies announcing how much revenue and growth they plan to get from sustainable innovations. GE’s Ecomagination has famously doubled its revenue targets from green products, from $10 to $20 billion between 2006 and 2010. Proctor & Gamble and DuPont have sustainable sales targets of $20 billion (by 2012) and $10 billion (by 2015) respectively. Philips wants its Green Flagship products to be delivering 30% of its sales turnover within the next four years. This is making sustainable innovation ‘serious business’.

Co-development – companies joining forces and collaborating, rather than seeing sustainability challenges as the responsibility of somebody else in the supply chain. Wal-Mart’s Sustainable Value Network brings together actors across entire industries to tackle some of the most tricky issues. Our own innovation work, which also draws on this collaborative approach, has been instrumental in developing Zero Emissions Paint systems with ICI Paints and Carillion.

Outside in – where companies are starting to bring in external experts for innovation, just as they’ve often used external advisors to help validate or assure work. Sustainability leader InterfaceFLOR has taken this a step further, using its Innovation Networks of eight or so outsiders not only for checks and balances, but for creativity and generating ideas for new sustainable products, services and business.

This article also appears in Green Futures

Chris Sherwin is Forum for the Future's head of innovation

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Getting real about sustainable housing

Ben Ross, April 7th 2008, General

With the 26 million homes in the UK generating around 27% of the nation’s carbon emissions, and being considered one of the easier areas for reduction, there’s clearly a lot of work to be done.

The main focus over the last few years has been on improving the performance of new buildings, through tightening building regulations and the new code for sustainable homes. While the target (and definitions) of all new-build homes being zero carbon by 2016 is clearly challenging, it gives us a mark to aim for.

But research by BRE has suggested that over 40% of new build do not achieve current building regulations, and even initial good performance rapidly decreases (Good Homes Alliance). So it’s not only design that needs to evolve significantly, but also materials, component manufacture and approaches to on-site construction. Demands on the market like this should drive innovation and the rapid development of new skills and supply chains.

While this is a critical part of national carbon reduction strategy, the elephant in the room is the poor performance of our existing housing stock. But it seems that the majority of people are standing with their backs to it and are trying hard not to notice it’s sheer size…this isn’t any old elephant, it’s a fully grown woolly mammoth. But recognition is certainly growing with just this week the Communities and Local Government Select Committee launching the ‘Existing Housing and Climate Change report’ calling on Ministers to “engage fully” with our existing stock and stating, “The Government must not be complacent”. There have been a number of programmes to improve the energy efficiency of our homes but, when you factor in the increasing expectations we have, in terms of the temperatures of our homes and the growth in consumer goods, we’re pretty much standing still!

The majority of the UK’s homes fall into Energy Performance Certificate bands of E, F or G, with an average SAP (the Government's Standard Assessment Procedure for energy rating of dwellings) rating in the high 40s. Recent research by Forum for the Future and URBED recommends an annual refurbishment rate of at least 1% (260,000 homes each year) by 2011, rising to at least 3.5% (910,000) by 2016. This level of activity would need to be maintained for a minimum of 20 years, in order to raise all domestic property into band C, with a SAP rating of at least 70. This is the magnitude of change that is required to give the UK a chance of meeting national carbon reduction targets.

To be effective in targeting the 70% of homes that are owner occupied it is vital that improving energy efficiency is both easy and convenient, and that all opportunities and points of influence, such as major refurbishment works, are taken. Providing a clear, structured and consistent approach will present huge opportunities for all, from community based social enterprises to the wider business community.

The issues discussed here are brought together in a new report on behalf of the West Midlands Sustainable Housing Action Programme. You can find out more and download a copy of the report here.

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