Editors Briefing on Climate Change

The media’s power to shape the way a nation thinks about and plans for its future is hard to overestimate. The particular complexity of climate change makes it critically important that editors and journalists understand the issue and its implications well enough to be able to communicate its importance to the public.

With this in mind we worked with an outstanding team of independent people and organizations in the sustainability field (see below) to create a one-day Editors’ Briefing on Climate Change on 6th August in Johannesburg. The Danish Embassy generously funded the event as part of their preparations for hosting the UN negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

Despite warnings from all sides that our target audience of editors and business / political journalists were notoriously hard to lure to such events and the subject matter was likely to interest only environmental journalists, we ended up with 21 of the ‘right’ kind of journalists and editors in the room (see below), with some 8 others telling us they would have come had they not been held back at the eleventh hour by some circumstance or other. All of them gave us very positive feedback on the usefulness of the day.

The Contributors
We had an exceptionally strong and willing roster of speakers (see below), including the UK Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change (Ed Miliband) and the Chairman of Shell UK (James Smith - by video link).

We are now actively looking at how we can expand this format to reach a much wider cross-section of the South African media.

If you have any questions or ideas, please contact Magda de Kok at magda.dekok@cpl.cam.ac.uk or 021 4694765.

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Additional reporting on this event

• David Le Page’s blog
• Business Day
• Polity
• Weekend Post

Programme Team

• Monica Graaff - Associate, Incite Sustainability
• Felicity Harrison - Project Director, Goedgedacht Forum for Social Reflection
• Leonie Joubert - Freelance science journalist
• David Le Page - Freelance journalist
• Branda Martin - Project Manager, Project 90 by 2030
• Peter Willis - South African Director, Cambridge Programme for Sustainability
• Mada de Kok - Senior Project Manager, Cambridge Programme for Sustainability

Contributors

• Tasneem Essop - World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)
• Karin Ireton - Director of Group Sustainability Management, Standard Bank
• Jorn Hammer - Vestas
• Dr Guy Midgley - South African National Biodiversity Institute & IPCC co-author
• Ed Miliband - UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
• Pancho Ndebele - Founder, Emvelo
• Mandy Rambharos - Climate Change and Sustainability Manager, Eskom
• Stefan Raubenheimer - CEO SouthSouthNorth & Senior Associate, Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership
• Dr Bob Scholes - CSIR & IPCC co-author
• James Smith - Chairman, Shell UK
• Richard Worthington - World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)

Delegates

• Quintin Wray - Editor, Business Report
• Barney Mthombothi - Editor, Financial Mail
• Ryk van Niekerk - Editor, Sake24
• Peter Bruce - Editor, Business Day
• Henry Jeffreys - Editor, Die Burger
• Moshongwa Matsena - Senior Editor Current Affairs, Channels Africa
• Marlene van Rooyen - Editor, 25 Degrees in Africa
• Peter Fabricius - Foreign Editor, The Independent Group
• Gavin Stewart - Editorial Consultant, Daily Dispatch
• Stephen Mulholland - Columnist, FinWeek
• Christy van der Merwe - Contributing Editor Online, Engineering News
• Francois Williams - Western Cape Editor, Sake24
• Chantelle Benjamin - Chief Reporter / Associate Editor, Business Day
• Nia McGregor - Bureau Chief, Femina Magazine
• Siseko Njobeni - Energy Editor, Business Day
• Jill de Villiers - Head of Programming, CNBC Africa
• Leigh Roberts - Anchor, CNBC Africa
• Sherilee Bridge - Financial & Commodities Journalist, I-Net Bridge
• Guy Rogers - Environment & Tourism Editor, Herald
• Tony Carnie - Environment Reporter, The Mercury
• Melanie-Anne Feris - Environment Reporter, CityPress
• Rest Kanju - Regional Programme Coordinator, Indigenous People, CBNRM and Climate Change for Southern Africa
• Amelia Genis - Senior Repoter, Landbou Weekblad
• Jorisna Bonthuys - Environmental Reporter, Die Burger
• Elise Templehoff - Environmental Reporter, Beeld
• Sharda Naidoo - Cover Editor, Financial Mail
• Peter Mashala - Journalist, Farmer’s Weekly

Biomimicry in engineering and building

Green buildings has a positive impact on a number of impacts besides water and electricity savings, says PD Naidoo & Associates Consulting Engineers in a recent Engineering News article.

“Green building is a broad name for efficiency across everything, not only buildings, and includes transport, structures, rail networks and waste disposal.”

This follows on statements in the same publication and in other reports that green buildings also improve the investment case for owners.

PD Naidoo & Associates continue that an increased understanding of the link between a building and its natural environment and the influences these have on each other has also led to new design approaches in construction.

The concept of biomimicry has increased in prevalence, they explain. Biomimicry involves the use of nature as inspiration for design concepts. Conventional examples of this are termite mounds, which run as efficient large-scale city-type habitations, and the invention of Velcro arising from observations of burrs on animal fur.

In the recent Brunel Lecture, Peter Head, director of ARUP, also referred to the 10 principles of Biomimicry as providing the solutions for sustainable design.

To learn a lot more about biomimicry, we invite you to attend one of the public lectures by Janine Benyus and some of the directors of the Biomimicry Institute. Get all the info here…

Janine Benyus recently spoke alongside former US president Bill Clinton and renowned business author Peter Senge at the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment Summit in Chicago.

Editor’s workshop on climate change

Climate Change: The biggest story ever?

A Workshop for South African Editors with Global and Local Experts
Park Hyatt Hotel, Rosebank, Thursday 6th August 2009

In Copenhagen in December the world will negotiate a new agreement on climate change and carbon emissions that will profoundly affect South Africa’s development in the next decades. What can we expect from this negotiation and what are its implications for South Africa’s economy in the years to come?

Up till now human-induced Climate Change has been regarded by most media and politicians as an ‘environmental’ issue. This view is fast becoming dangerously inaccurate. The growing involvement of all major governments and many of the world’s largest companies in finding ways to mitigate this turbulence indicates that Climate Change is now a central economic and social issue, capable of dramatically altering political and economic landscapes over the coming years.

What confronts South Africa? Who is doing what to develop a coherent response? And what might the media’s role be? These and other questions will be addressed during a workshop for editors and senior journalists hosted by Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL) on 6 August 2009.

The day features contributions by James Smith, Chairman of Shell UK, and a veritable line-up of local climate experts including three contributors to the 4th UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2007.

A further highlight of the day is a visit by British Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, Mr. Ed Milliband.

The workshop is funded by the Danish government in support of its hosting the UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

The day’s programme consist of two parts: A breakfast session with inputs from two leading voices on climate change and business; and small group discussions with local climate scientists, policy experts and business leaders facilitated by Peter Willis & Richard Calland.

For any further details, you can get in touch with Magda de Kok at magda.dekok@cpsl.cam.ac.uk or 021 469 4765.

TRUTH or COMFORT?

On Reading James Lovelock’s “The Vanishing Face of Gaia - A Final Warning”

By: Peter Willis

If I look back on the many moments of challenge and disturbance in my life it’s clear that a critical question at such moments has always been “How much truth am I willing to expose myself to?” I think it’s fair to say that the only reason I’ve been able to come through some of those challenges and move on has been because I’ve opened myself to a fresh degree of truth, usually truth about my character, assumptions or behaviour. This is always uncomfortable as it involves having to acknowledge that some aspects of my self with which I was perfectly content have in fact been causing problems for others and if I want the benefit of good relations with those others the old behaviours will have to change. And giving up on a view of myself that used to work just fine (at least, so I thought) is a hard wrench.

Of course there is always the option of denial, to which I am no stranger. I simply discount the new, challenging information and re-affirm that I am fine just as I am and it is the others who have misunderstood the situation. It is usually possible to find evidence that validates this ‘status quo’ and allows me to carry on in my groove. That is, until the next time, when the challenge tends to arrive with much greater force.

If you are wondering why this bout of psychological introspection, it is because I have just read “The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning” (Allen Lane 2009), written by one of the greatest living earth scientists, James Lovelock. At the age of 90 Lovelock is a master with no need to prove anything to anyone. An independent scientist and inventor for the past 45 years, reliant not on government grants but what he could make from his own inventions and advisory work, he speaks about the future of human civilization on Earth with a breadth of knowledge and a freedom of perspective that comes like a breath of fresh air…and fresh truth. I cannot remember when I was so challenged by a single, short book.

Lovelock is widely known as the creator of Gaia theory, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. Gaia theory states that, rather than life taking place on an inert planet made up of rocks, gases and other lifeless elements, living organisms (including us) form an interactive system with these elements in order to create the conditions for further life to emerge and flourish. For example living organisms will use all their evolutionary ingenuity to, for example, create and maintain an atmosphere that favours their own survival and growth. The idea that plants, microbes and animals could influence the atmosphere has been a hard one for most physicists, geologists, chemists and others to accept, maintaining as they do that the atmosphere is made up of a mixture of inert gases and particles driven primarily by the power of the sun. Indeed it has taken all of 40 years for the wider scientific community to allow the validity of this theory and even now its full implications are far from being grasped by both mainstream scientists and certainly the wider public.

So why is Gaia theory important, and especially now? Any scientific theory is only as important as its ability to predict how the system that it refers to will behave in future. Look at how successful the theory of Gravity has been in predicting how and where objects will fall, even though nobody fully understands why gravity operates in the way it does.

Gaia theory is critically important now because it has been pointing all along to a strong link between the health of the Earth’s living systems and the state of the climate. Nobody doubts that a hotter climate will have big impacts on living systems like agriculture, forests, water and indeed us humans, but Lovelock has for years been saying the opposite as well - that the more we interfere with (i.e. destroy, pollute or build over) nature’s complex eco-systems, the less able they are to do their work of regulating atmospheric temperature. One of the predictions he made using Gaia theory was that tropical and boreal forests play an important role in regulating global temperature. This has been proven and is now generally accepted, hence the growing focus on preserving what we have left of these forest systems.

But as a student of the field of sustainability for the past twelve years all of this on its own would not have been enough to surprise or shock me. What has stopped me in my tracks is Lovelock’s argument that we humans have done so much damage to eco-systems and have put so much CO2 up into the atmosphere at such an extraordinary speed during the past 200 years that we have overwhelmed nature’s ability to regulate the atmospheric temperature at an optimal level and he believes that we are very close to witnessing a swift rise of 5°C in global average temperature, from which it will take thousands of years to retreat back to our current ‘normal’. Such a ‘hot state’ will make it impossible for human settlement to continue in many parts of the world as agriculture will fail. This will almost certainly result in mass migration, conflict over shrinking resources and much premature death. By the second half of this century Lovelock sees the Earth carrying only about 100 million people instead of the current load of about 6,3 billion, a culling of 62 out of every 63 people now alive.

Those who survive will, he suggests, be clustered in the few areas still blessed with an ability to grow food. His hope is that, from this new, stable ‘hot state’ human civilization will be able – if all goes well – to partner with Gaia much more consciously and help ‘her’ to become a more fully intelligent planet with a much longer life span than she might otherwise manage.

He reminds us that since humans first emerged on earth about 1 million years ago there have been seven extreme climatic shifts, from cool to warm and from warm to cool. Each of them was devastating to the humans alive at the time and some geneticists believe that one of the incidents caused the human population to sink as low as around 2,000 people, a period known as “the genetic bottleneck”. Lovelock believes our enormous population growth and burning of fossil fuels have made it likely that the coming transition will be more violent than any before, requiring all our best qualities of leadership and collective compassion and ingenuity to avoid it becoming the end of human civilization altogether.

When one of the finest scientific minds our species has produced makes an assessment like this after 90 years of life and still in full possession of his brilliant faculties (see his fascinating interview about the book on YouTube) one must take notice. Though he would be the last to say he had discovered “the truth” about our future, his arguments for predicting a very rough time ahead are based on rigorous scientific method and a lifetime of experiment and engagement with the great scientific minds of his age. Though he comes across as a cheerful man, Lovelock has clearly thought deeply about the consequences of what he is seeing. Being responsible, he shares what he sees with us.

What we do with his unpalatable information is, of course, up to us. I’ve taken the decision to hold his analysis in the front of my mind from now on (until it is superseded by something even more convincing) and not do what I’m strongly tempted to do, which is to sweep it under the rug and go on believing that we are merely facing a set of severe problems to which we may, if we work hard and swiftly at it, soon find the solutions.

I am now working on the assumption that we have passed that point. There is nothing we can currently conceive of doing that will preserve a remotely decent life – indeed any life at all – for between 6 and 7 billion people on earth. How soon will the large-scale destruction of life-supporting systems begin? Interestingly, Lovelock sees this coming not next year or even necessarily within the next 5-10 years, but he believes that once it begins “it will be very rapid indeed”.

So where has this left me? Two thoughts predominate for me as I write this – one looks backward, the other looks forward. First, I am profoundly struck by the realization that we humans, in what has been our ‘grand project’ of the past seven millennia, to settle the earth and achieve the comfortable living of our dreams, have failed comprehensively. For just as that dream appears within our grasp (look at the extraordinary levels of comfort in which about 1 billion people now live all over the world) it is revealed to us as being built on illusory foundations. Before we embarked on agriculture we barely disturbed Gaia, in fact probably contributed to the evolution of her self-regulatory systems. Once we learned how to create food surpluses and started altering large landscapes we began to weaken other aspects of the Gaia system. With the Industrial Revolution we slammed our foot to the floor and have not lifted it since.

As Lovelock puts it, “If there were only 100 million of us on the Earth we could do almost anything we liked without harm. At 7 billion I doubt anything sustainable is possible or will significantly reduce fossil fuel combustion; by significantly I mean enough to reduce global heating. Seven billion living as we do, and aspire to do, is too many for a planet that tries to self-regulate its climate.”

This being the case, I look around me at so many examples of human success (technological, institutional, cultural, etc.) and ask “How can we judge anything a success if the whole project of human civilization is basically a failure?” Something in me refuses to take this in fully. I still find pleasure and joy in small things human and man-made – I am still terribly attached to my tribe and its achievements. But in the harsh reckoning of the likely near future so many of my tribe’s successes are going to look so very hollow.

The second thought that arises for me is about what is worth doing now. For despite feeling a disabling sense of grief and near despair, I also feel moved respond by taking action. Each of us has a different gift to bring to the world and mine, I think, is to do with bringing diverse people together to think beyond their normal boundaries. So I am thinking about how to draw together people of influence from all corners of South African society to start thinking through the practical implications of what Lovelock and other systems scientists are telling us. I have no illusions that this will be easy – my own attempts to imagine what it might be like to plan for mass migration away from low-lying coastal areas, to take just one example, show me that this is no picnic, and as the great early 19th century philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “The average man would rather face death or torture than think.” But I believe that once any group of intelligent, responsible people is given the chance to engage with the science and start their own personal journey of grasping what may lie ahead, they will become available for creative, humane leadership, of which we will need plenty.

I am not sorry to have been shaken out of my comfort. I fully expect to seek out fresh comfort in different forms for the rest of my life – I think it’s part of my nature – but I also acknowledge that comfort can bring great danger and to be shaken out of it by an exposure to new truths is a necessary part of being fully alive and enables me to play my own modest, ephemeral part in this much greater story of Life.

2 August 2009

Looking to the future by going back to nature

Biomimicry uses nature’s ingenious designs in advanced and sustainable technologies, writes SARAH WILD in The Weekender of 1 August 2009.

“Ever wondered how geckos run across a ceiling without falling off? Or how the prairies survived for thousands of years without soil erosion or colonies of pests?

Biomimeticists think about questions like these. Biomimicry is studying nature, understanding how it works and using it as a model for our designs.”

Read the full article here…