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.

What you buy shapes your carbon footprint. Procurement decisions determine how much electricity you use when you email, how much water you flush away when you use the bathroom, and even how much stuff you chuck in the bin.

That means procurement professionals have the opportunity to make huge cuts in their organisations’ carbon emissions. They can buy equipment which is more energy efficient, which requires less water in its use, and which produces less waste.

And by happy coincidence, often these more sustainable choices will save you money, resulting in lower utility bills and cost reductions under the Carbon Reduction Commitment.

But knowing what supplier or product will help you reduce your emissions most, and whether this will save money over time, can be tricky, especially when working within the EU procurement rules.

That’s why Forum for the Future and Fife Council teamed up to develop the award-winning Whole Life Costing + CO2 tool (WLC+CO2).

The tool helps procurers to understand the CO2 cost as well as the whole life financial costs of a product. It calculates how much CO2 will be emitted by different products during the contract period, and how much these emissions will cost under the Carbon Reduction Commitment or other carbon pricing schemes.

The new tool has been piloted by Fife Council and is now in use by their central procurement team. “It will be of great assistance to all organisations which are trying to reduce their carbon footprint and green the supply chain," believes Keith Grieve, the council’s Procurement and Supply Chain Management Team Leader.

He says the tool is “allowing us to compare individual products in terms of carbon emissions and to apply a value to those emissions which in turn can influence the award of the contract.”

Fife’s pilot confirms that the tool is simple to use and covers only verifiable information - making it acceptable under EU rules. The council was awarded the Government Opportunities Sustainability Award for its use of the tool in October 2009.

The WLC+CO2 tool builds on the whole life costing module of Forum’s popular Sustainable Procurement Toolkit, which allows procurers to calculate costs across the whole life of a product. It adds the ability to calculate the costs of CO2 emissions from the product.

We’d recommend using both tools to fully embed sustainability into procurement – the Sustainable Procurement Toolkit to help you review the demand for your product and to plan what actions you will take during the procurement process to maximise sustainability, and then the new WLC+CO2 tool to help you evaluate your tenders.

Both tools and the accompanying guidance are now available to everyone.

Please email Anna Warrington for your copy or for more information.

Download the guidance notes for the tool.

Today we unveil our third annual Sustainable Cities Index and the big news is that Newcastle is Britain’s most sustainable city, knocking the previous two winners – Bristol and Brighton – into second and third places respectively.

This might come as a big surprise as unlike those other cities, Newcastle doesn’t have a reputation for being particularly ‘green’.  But Newcastle has won because it does fairly well across the whole set of indicators we use to capture a balanced picture of cities’ sustainability, with no particular area of weakness. 

The Sustainable Cities Index ranks Britain’s 20 largest cities according to their performance in three broad areas: their impact on the environment, their citizens’ quality of life, and their readiness for future challenges. Both Bristol and Brighton have great scores on our quality of life and future-proofing indicators, but perform less well on environmental impact, bringing them down overall.

For me that reinforces one of the key messages about sustainability, that it’s all about striking a balance between the economic, the environmental and the social, and avoiding trade-offs.  

It’s also interesting that our cities that do have green reputations are weaker on environmental indicators than others. That could suggest that some of their reputation is built on the quality of life they offer, so maybe people do understand being green in that broader sense.  Good news for those of us who make our living saying just that!

With all the talk over the last year about green economic recovery, we also thought it was timely to ask what that means at a city level.  People use the term to mean a lot of different things from making existing business more energy efficient, right through to challenging the capitalist economic model. 

We’ve found that there is plenty that local authorities can be doing to promote green economic recovery at different levels.  They can work with businesses to understand their reliance on the local environment and society, they can direct their own spend on to more sustainable goods and services, and they can encourage and promote the innovation that we’ll need to move into a more sustainable future. 

Our winning city – Newcastle – is located in the country’s first designated Low Carbon Economic Area.  Manchester has plans to build on its industrial heritage to lead the way to a cleaner future. And Birmingham is also thinking about its contribution to the next industrial revolution. 

Cities that find the sweet-spot of low-carbon innovation that grows the local economy, providing jobs and better quality of life will be the truly sustainable cities of tomorrow.  The race is on.

Read the full report

Even today’s climate optimists acknowledge that there are going to have to be some traumatic ‘shocks to the system’, induced by accelerated climate change, to jolt politicians the world over to move up a gear (well, several gears).

These shocks will come, and from the perspective of our long-term prospects, they need to come as rapidly as possible.  And to be as traumatic as possible – otherwise, politicians and their electorates will rapidly revert to the current mix of non-specific anxiety and inertia.

Post-Katrina, for instance, public opinion in the US provided the best example of this phenomenon.  It took just two years for Fox News and other right-wing shock-jocks to straighten out deviant US citizens who’d started to think that it really might be time for the US to get stuck in on climate change.

But Australia provides an even more compelling story.  Over the last few years, it’s had more than its fair share of traumatic shocks.  Earlier this year, Melbourne broke its record February temperature by a full 3°C to hit 46.8°C.  This was also the day of Australia’s worst ever bush fires, with 173 people killed and 2000 homes destroyed.  The Murray-Darling Basin (Australia’s food bowl, with nearly 40% of Australia’s agricultural production based around its waters) has been in so-called ‘drought’ since 2002.  Flow levels are now down to 5% of their long-term average.  As a result, it’s now assumed that the globally significant wetlands and lake system at the river’s mouth will face ecological collapse over the next few years.

And now there’s a new report out in Australia, featured in the Guardian on Wednesday, (‘Managing Our Coastal Zones in a Changing Climate’) which reveals that more than £80 billion of property is at risk from rising sea levels and more frequent storms – and that’s going to send a bit of a shock wave down the backbones of the 80% of Australian citizens who live along the coastline!  The report’s principle policy proposal is that there should be a ban on any further development at beach level.

So what’s been the net impact of all these shocks on Australian politics?  The victory of Kevin Rudd over John Howard in the most recent general election in Australia was attributed in part to his relatively progressive stance on climate change.  But since then, there’s been one set back after another in terms of introducing appropriate policy interventions, with Australia’s mining and coal industries in full-on defensive mode, and its equivalent of the CBI acting exactly like our CBI did under the Neanderthal leadership of Digby Jones a few years ago.

The outcome of which is that Australia is still doing very little on climate change, and has no chance whatsoever of meeting its Kyoto targets.  It still pursues its dreams of unbridled affluence, California-style, and is about as far from adopting a leadership role as it is possible to get.

Clearly the shocks to their systems just haven’t been bad enough – which gives us some sense of just how bad future climate shocks are going to have to be to drive any serious transformation.

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.