Do the email exchanges hacked from the University of East Anglia computers indicate skulduggery? I cannot comment. The proposed enquiry will surely settle that point. What I can say is that after six years as a ‘lay’ member of the Natural Environment Research Council board, I encountered only a determination amongst climate scientists to get the science as right as possible. 
 
Nevertheless, it should not be a surprise that there are those who dispute the science around climate change.  Search for an academic to back any outlandish point of view, and you will find one, with motivations ranging from the muddled to the malevolent.   The massive amount of money the fossil fuel industry pours into promoting the malevolent objective of climate denial helps it gain more ‘air time’ for its views than it deserves. As does the laziness of the media in giving equal coverage to for-and-against formats for arguments, regardless of the weighting of the evidence. (Remember the damage done by one doctor’s views about the MMR vaccine?)
 
A naturally disputatious species, the really extraordinary thing about climate scientists is that so many agree about so much!  The 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the output of 2500 expert reviewers, 800 authors, and 140 political leaders from over 130 countries.  It would take more than one bad apple in UEA or anywhere else to negate those overall conclusions, which are increasingly confirmed by the evidence of our own eyes.
 
As world experts and leaders gather in Copenhagen for the number- and word-crunching part of the process, lets wish them wisdom and luck, and hope they are not put off the biggest political leadership challenge ever - making decisions now about commitments which will have a pay-off period beyond their term of office.

When I was still Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, I was hoping to produce a snapshot of just how deep sustainable development had penetrated into the workings of government – since the election of the Labour Government in 1997, the establishment of the Sustainable Development Commission in 2000, and the issuing of the Sustainable Development Strategy, ‘Securing the Future’.  As it happens, it didn’t get done.  Which has allowed me a few extra months to reflect in less frenetic circumstances.

And that’s been helpful!  I have to admit, I was feeling a bit grumpy back in July.  There’s only so much head banging one can do before brain damage sets in!  And so much of what the Sustainable Development Commission does is going on behind the scenes – received and acted on, for example, by bodies like the Environmental Audit Committee, the Office of Government Commerce, individual departments and so on.

And if one gets really disciplined about both sides of the balance sheet (the pluses and the minuses), the overall picture on the standing of sustainable development question is actually “not half bad” – and I’m constantly struck by just how impressed people from other countries are at the ‘sustainable development architecture’ that’s been created here in the UK, including the Sustainable Development Commission itself.

But there still remains something of a mystery here, despite all the good things, it’s demonstrably clear to me that not enough has changed on the ground.  Plenty of good process but not enough good outcomes (and quite a few really bad outcomes!)

That’s the mystery I’ve tried to unravel in this new Report, unimaginatively entitled The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government.  Not an all-singing, all-dancing retrospective, and certainly not a completely dispassionate study.  But useful for all that, I hope.

View full report

You can’t fault our Government for its ongoing efforts to get people to focus on the Copenhagen Conference.  Both the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband are out there emphasising the ‘make or break’ nature of the event: governments either seal the deal now, or we could be into drift for a couple of years.

Personally I’m not so sure about this kind of rhetoric. It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world if it took another six or nine months to get the right deal sealed – and that means a deal with the US on board.  And that probably won’t happen until some kind of climate bill has got through the US Senate.

That, at least, was the prevailing view at the end of the most recent round of talks in Bangkok a couple of weeks ago.  The Senate is bogged down in health insurance stuff; Obama doesn’t want to use his political capital to try and force it through the Senate prior to Copenhagen; and he absolutely doesn’t want a re-run of the Kyoto process, where Al Gore signed off on the Kyoto Protocol only to find that the Senate would have nothing to do with it later on. 

And that’s the reason Obama hasn’t accepted the invitation to go to Copenhagen himself in order to bring his own personal leadership to bear on the negotiations.

Because the focus of a lot of this discussion is about Obama and most people just seem to have bought into this approach.  That’s just the way it is: unfortunate timing and all that. America doing its best in difficult domestic circumstances.

I must say, I don’t quite see it like that. I think this represents a massive failure on Obama’s part.  As the rest of the world raises its game (particularly in key countries like China, India and Brazil), the United States’ negotiating position, in essence, doesn’t seem to have advanced much beyond George Bush’s negotiating position.

US negotiators still refuse to acknowledge historical responsibility.  They’re still trying to force developing countries to do what America itself has totally failed to do up until now – and doesn’t show much readiness to do it even now.  They’re still trying to change the baseline date from 1990 to 2005 – and, in essence, want to tear up Kyoto rather than build on it by allowing each country to determine its own path to greenhouse gas reductions.

For US negotiators, read Obama. I don’t know why everyone (and particularly Government ministers) is being so ‘understanding’ about this.  It’s a despicable, immoral, self-serving, treaty-wrecking negotiating position which, in the current context, where the need for action is so much greater, and so many other countries are now playing ball, is no better than what George Bush was doing during his eight poisonous years in the White House.

I can’t help it, but I love seeing the Treasury discomfited. Through my nine years with the Sustainable Development Commission they set up so many barriers to promoting more sustainable economic growth, did so many foolish things, and missed so many opportunities, that I can’t help but feel a little bitter.

They were particularly obstructive in terms of the work the Commission did on economic growth, seeking to open up the debate about the completely irrational way in which the pursuit of GDP has come to dominate all economic policy debates.

The Commission’s report, ‘Prosperity Without Growth?’ was met with a combination of disdain and indifference that only the Treasury is capable of. The Commission was told, in no uncertain terms, that this just wasn’t the kind of advice that the UK Government needed.

So I had particularly good reason to celebrate the publication of a new report, authored by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen on the ‘Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress’, commissioned personally by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, questioning the continued obsession of nations with conventionally measured economic growth.

“For years, statistics have registered an increasingly strong economic growth as a victory over shortage – until it emerged that this growth was destroying more than it was creating,” said Sarkozy, endorsing the report. “The crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so”.

President Sarkozy has instructed France’s national statistics body to update its gathering and reporting of economic statistics in line with the report’s recommendations. Better yet, he will invite other world leaders to join his crusade against what the report describes as “GDP Fetishism”. “France will put this report on the agenda of all international meetings, including next week’s G20 Summit,” Sarkozy said.

I fear he’ll get very short shrift from Gordon Brown, who will see it as an irritatingly Gallic distraction from the serious business of getting the global economy back on track.

Inconveniently, that’s precisely the same track that has caused such devastating damage to the Earth’s life support systems that sustain us, has unleashed what could still prove to be irreversible climate change, has left between one and two billion people living in conditions of dire poverty, and has ruthlessly promoted private greed and avarice over social wellbeing and community cohesion.

In other words, exactly the kind of growth-based economics that “destroys more than it creates” – to paraphrase the French President.

 

My final blog as chair of the Sustainable Development Commission – this being my final day!  

It has been an extraordinary nine years. Back in June 2000, when Michael Meacher persuaded John Prescott to persuade Tony Blair that I would (despite all the obvious downsides!) be a suitable candidate for the SDC’s first Chair, we didn’t really have much to go on. There were various initiatives that had arisen out of the 1992 Earth Summit (a round table, a high-level advisory group reporting to the prime minister, a decent but largely ignored strategy and so on), but zero understanding across government that sustainable development was anything other than environmentalism by another name. Our budget was small (around £350K), our welcome was muted, expectations were low (‘just another government-sponsored talkshop’) – but our ambitions were large!

It’s all a bit different now.  We have got a real job, reasonable resources, a good ‘inside track’ with much of Whitehall and with the governments of Scotland and Wales, a genuinely independent persona, the inevitable mish-mash of respect, irritation, disregard and enthusiasm for what we do, both within and beyond government, and a reasonable portfolio of serious interventions, publications, watchdog reports, policy breakthroughs and constructive engagement with departments that has helped make a real difference.

Though it may not always see this as a blessing, the UK government has earned a lot of credit internationally for setting up a body like the SDC, as well for formulating what is still a cracking good SD strategy (Securing the Future) in 2005. The ‘mainstreaming’ imperative that drives all our work (“to make sustainable development the central organising principle of everything Government does”) may not as yet have got as far as we would have liked, but it has got a lot further than many may once have thought possible.

Getting the balance right between our advisory and capacity-building work on the one hand, and our watchdog work on the other, remains something of an art form – and it has to be said there have been several ministers (and even more senior civil servants!) who have been pretty angst-ridden about that balancing act over the years.

But though it’s bound to be frustrating for any government to have a body like the SDC commenting on weaknesses as well as strengths (the media, of course, are only ever interested in the former!), I suspect the conclusion amongst most of them is broadly supportive.  At least, I very much hope it is!

So full marks to the government (and to DEFRA in particular) for some serious process innovation here, and to that cohort of SD champions inside the system working away indefatigably to improve the performance of their organisations, often invisibly and usually unloved. They have been amazing. 

But the real strength of the Commission lies in that combination of experienced, passionate and totally committed Commissioners, working closely with an extraordinarily professional and equally committed Secretariat.  It has been an unbelievable privilege to be part of that – and, in true SD style, to leave things at least a little bit better on quitting the post than they were on arriving!

I’ve just finished reading Oxfam’s new report on climate change and poverty, (“Suffering the Science”), prepared especially for the G8 meeting now underway in Italy. Gloomy, but hugely powerful stuff:

“Climate change’s most savage impact on humanity in the near future is likely to be in the increase in hunger. The countries with existing problems in feeding their people are those most at risk from climate change. Millions of farmers will have to give up traditional crops as they experience changes in the seasons that they and their ancestors have depended on. Climate-related hunger may become the defining human tragedy of this century”.

It’s not all doom and gloom. The report replays a lot of Oxfam’s excellent proposals on sustainable agriculture, with a new emphasis on adaptation to climate change. There’s just so much that could be happening right now.

Coming hot on the heels of the equally impactful report from the Global Humanitarian Forum (“The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis”), it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the development/poverty/equity end of the spectrum of NGOs involved in this area is playing a massive part in civil society’s efforts to spur politicians on.

And that brought to mind, yet again, my old friend Richard Sandbrook – a former Director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, and Trustee of both Forum for the Future and The Eden Project for many years before his untimely death. He’s been in my thoughts a lot lately (having just given the second Richard Sandbrook Memorial Lecture a couple of weeks ago), wondering how he would be responding to the growing levels of activity in the run up to the Copenhagen Conference.

Although Richard was himself an NGO-man through and through, he spent a disproportionate amount of time giving them a very hard time for their negativity, territoriality and all-round lack of creativity in bringing forward new ideas to accelerate the solutions agenda – particularly as regards their inability to work properly with business.

Most NGOs took it all in good heart (“don’t worry, it’s just Richard off on another bout of NGO-bashing”), but others used to get quite grumpy about it, even accusing him of having ‘sold out’ to big corporates like Rio Tinto, big forestry companies and so on.

Forum for the Future gets more than its fair share of the ‘selling out’ critique, and we just put up with that as part and parcel of operating in this high risk area. But we too were a bit mystified at Richard’s anti-NGO tirades.

And I wonder if he would still be taking that line today? So many NGOs now work in one way or another with the private sector, including quite radical NGOs like the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade. Even Oxfam is deepening its relationship with some of the biggest companies in the world.

And on a macro-scale, in terms of the balance between government, business and civil society, as agents of change in their respective spheres, I would also argue that the continuing failure of governments to drive a completely different model of wealth creation leaves even the most progressive companies struggling to do much more than mitigate the worst effects of business-as-usual economic growth.

Which means, logically, that the onus is even more on NGOs (as embodiments of civil society) to make it possible for governments to do what they are absolutely going to have to do – sooner or later.

So I ended up using my Memorial Lecture to suggest that Richard’s deep frustration with NGOs might, by now, have moved into a rather different place. But it would, no doubt, have been equally challenging!

Watch videos of the lecture:

Clip 1 - introduction to the lecture, includes some compelling thoughts on climate change.

Clip 2 - the case for optimism, contrasted against adopting a 'war footing' or James Lovelock fatalism in dealing with climate change and resource scarcity.

Clip 3 - anger and other psychological reactions to climate change. (less good quality - turn sound up or listen on headphones).

 

Bath plugs, mock-Tudor beams, dog food, light bulbs… have last week’s newspaper headlines reminded anyone else of the conveyor belt from the Generation Game?

It’s been a succession of ever more improbable items floating past leaving the impression of a multitude of things, but when the music stops you’re hazy on the details.  In this particular game, though, what matters in the end isn’t the individual items, it’s the overall implication for politics and governance.

It’s easy to get caught up in the (fascinating and sordid) details of who spent how much on what, to be insulted by the sheer cheek of it all – first that MPs (and no, not all of them, but it does seem like many) claimed for things they weren’t entitled to, and secondly that they think paying it back somehow makes it all ok.

But it’s the bigger picture that matters.

First the bankers with their bonuses and their pensions, now the MPs with their hands in the expenses drawer - could the inequalities in our society be better illustrated than by an MP paying back a cheque of higher value than the mean UK annual salary?

Over the last six months it’s felt like we’ve never been further from having a “strong, healthy and just society”, one of the core objectives of the government’s sustainable development framework.   

Underpinning those core objectives are the supporting principles: using sound science responsibly, achieving a sustainable economy and promoting good governance.  Good governance is what’s at stake here.

With all the main parties implicated in the expenses scandal we should look beyond our current government and party politics, and question how we are governed and the implications that has for our society.

What this scandal has highlighted more than anything else is the huge disconnect between the elected and the electorate: it’s more than just that MPs have committed these errors, it’s that they don’t fully understand why the public is so shocked; that they appear to think paying it back makes it ok, and that the test they have failed is not “is this right or wrong?” but “how does this look?”

In this sense the expenses scandal is the tip of an iceberg, a visible sign of the loss of trust in MPs and our political system. Falling voter turnout is another clear indicator of disillusionment. Turnout in general elections ranged from between 72% to 83% in the post-war years until 1997, then fell to a low of 59% in 2001 and 61% in 2005.

This current scandal won’t be solved by holding a general election - because with all the parties implicated who do you vote for?  - and there’s a real democratic concern about just how low the turnout can fall.  Meanwhile, with the mainstream parties all tarnished, the spectre is looming of a big vote for the BNP in the European Parliament elections on 4 June.

Under ‘good governance’ in the sustainable development framework the government talks about “Actively promoting effective, participative systems of governance, in all levels of society”.  This seems like a good starting point for a solution.

We need a radical overhaul of our democratic system to encourage voter participation and to make MPs more connected with their local community than just via their second home. Most importantly – we need to make people feel connected with those who govern them, and to make them feel that they have a stake in politics, and make them want to vote. There are countries in the world, which do this better than us, let’s learn from them.

Nothing is certain in politics, but you wouldn’t bet on Gordon Brown having a long political future from here.  He’s still got time to get something right, though, and go down in history for achieving something, which creates lasting change.  That’s much more than fiddling around with some rules on what expenses are allowable or not – it’s about radically overhauling the system, and reconnecting with the people who live in this country, not just wiping the egg off the faces of the people who currently run it.

At last, the Sustainable Development Commission’s magnum opus has landed. Prosperity Without Growth? was launched on Monday, representing the culmination of five years’ work. Tim Jackson, the Economics Commissioner has produced an absolute ‘tour de force’. And there’s a lot riding on this for the Commission.

Way back in the mists of time, through the 70s and into the early 80s, there was an extremely lively debate about the compatibility between economic growth and big-picture resource and sustainability issues. Heavyweight economists batted academic papers back and forth; party political conferences formally debated the pros and cons of economic growth. All this was nicely stoked up by the two Opec-induced oil shocks and even the media were all over it.

Then oil prices came plunging back down, Jimmy Carter got stuffed by Ronald Reagan and free market fundamentalists began their long march through the knackered ranks of superannuated Keynesians.

The consequence of this has been that hardly any serious discussion about economic growth and sustainability has taken place since then. Unbelievable, in retrospect, as even a fool could tell you that if you continue to grow both the number of human beings and the volume of goods and services consumed by each of those human beings, on a planet with limited resources and stressed-out life support systems, then you are heading inevitably for a bust. Sooner or later.

Politicians of all persuasions have hugely enjoyed their 20-year leave of absence. But it’s an inexcusable dereliction of duty to go on avoiding this crunch point in the light of what’s been happening over the last few years – with oil going to $147 a barrel, food reserves at their lowest level for decades, chronic water shortages the world over, accelerating climate change and so on.

Paradoxically, the collapse in the global economy gives us some breathing space – but not much. If it’s back to business-as-usual, growth-at-all-costs as the sole route to progress, then biophysical reality will not long be delayed.

Politicians have got used to using one get-out clause in terms of avoiding any intellectual encounter with that crunch point: decoupling. Just decouple the benefits of economic growth from its costs (or externalities, as economists call them) through technology-driven resource efficiency, and all will be well.

If only. One of the toughest messages in Prosperity Without Growth? comes in Tim Jackson’s clinical critique of 'the myth of decoupling'. The reality is that even progress on relative decoupling (reduced environmental impact per unit of GDP) has been limited, whilst progress on absolute decoupling (reduced environmental impact full stop) which is what we have to achieve, has been non-existent.

That isn’t to deny the critical significance of decoupling. We desperately need far more of it than anything we’ve seen so far. Which means governments have got to do it, rather than just talk about it, even as they come to the inconvenient conclusion that it won’t be enough on its own.

Politicians may not want to hear these messages. But it’s our task to broadcast them much more loudly and much more clearly than we’ve done over the last 20 years. And Prosperity Without Growth? is what you need to make that happen.