Green WARRIOR
Governments should make businesses bear the cost of their environmental impact, says Jonathon Porritt, cofounder of Forum for the Future.
If a business cares about long-term prosperity — or indeed, long-term survival — then it has to care about environmental sustainability. That’s the message that British environmentalist Jonathon Porritt has been spreading via Forum for the Future since 1996. The basic concept of sustainability, after all, is blindingly simple: using fewer resources to provide better goods and services.
“That’s not really an ideological thing,” he says. “It’s just common sense. It’s good economics. It’s the celebration of innovation.”
With offices in the United Kingdom, Singapore, the United States and India, Forum for the Future works with governments, businesses and civil society to accelerate change toward a sustainable future.
The organisation is one of many pathways through which Mr Porritt has championed green issues over the years, from chairing Britain’s Green Party, to being director of Friends of the Earth, to writing books.
In 2000, he was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to environmental protection.
But the 68-year-old’s green journey had more modest beginnings, almost half a century ago.
PERSONAL TO POLITICAL
Before starting his degree in modern languages at Oxford University — and later, during summer holidays in the ensuing years — the young Mr Porritt worked on farms and planted trees in Australia and New Zealand, where his family was then based.
“I really loved being in those very primal environments, working on the land,” he recalls.
Around the same time, he read two books that set him squarely on the green path. One was A Blueprint for Survival, published in 1972 by The Ecologist magazine, which he calls “a brilliant summary of all the things we’d begun to learn about our impact on the natural world” and the consequences if things continued on in the same vein.
The other, The Limits to Growth, published the same year by four MIT scientists, was a “more academic attempt” to consider how finite resources could limit economic and population growth.
In 1974, he became an English and drama teacher at a state school in West London — an area with “huge housing estates, no green … nothing to do with nature”.
Having experienced the vast night skies of New Zealand, he was especially struck by urban light pollution. “These kids never ever saw the stars.”
He started taking students on trips to the Welsh countryside, to learn about farming and the natural world.
“And it was fascinating, because they’d literally never experienced silence and they’d never experienced complete darkness,” he recalls. “I bet that’s the same for a lot of kids in Singapore — (they) have never ever had a chance to connect with the natural world that way.”
He found a far wider platform when he joined the Ecology Party — now the Green Party — in 1974, standing for election in 1979 and 1983. “[When I joined], I wasn’t thinking about a career in politics. I was just thinking about: How can one introduce people to a different way of seeing the world and a more radical acknowledgement of our responsibilities to that world?”
Today, there is much greater mainstream awareness of the need to be eco-friendly, he says. “It’s so different now. Because there is a kind of background level of concern about the environment and the damage we’re doing to the environment.
“Back in the 1970s, if you’d started talking about plastic pollution, people would have said: ‘What are you talking about?’”
Yet as heartening as this increased awareness is, the green movement cannot rely on individuals alone: “I’m much more sceptical about the idea of consumers actually bringing about wholesale change in our lifestyles and our economy,” says Mr Porritt.
“I’ve witnessed it for too long: that there’s been this promise that if enough people change their buying behaviour or change some of the individual decisions in their lives … that this will somehow bring the whole of the wealth-creating world to the place where they do everything sustainably. It’s just not true.”
Across various countries, the percentage of consumers willing to “change their lives” to reflect environmental concerns is rarely more than 15% — and this has not moved much in two decades, he says.
“With that level of personal commitment to live differently, it’s not enough to change the system.”
Another 30% to 40% might care enough to use their purchasing power responsibly, but not to the extent of changing their lives, he adds. That is why it comes down to “the critical role of governments, to regulate these things rather than leave it to the individual consumers”.
The good news is that the time is ripe for change, he says. “Governments are now working with the grain of public opinion in that area, rather than against the grain of public opinion.”
Enterprising politicians should notice the current trend and work with it, he adds. “Indignation is rising; people don’t like the idea that we’re just carelessly trashing our planet and killing off life in the oceans.”
That said, liberal democracy is no prerequisite. China, after all, is one country where politicians have taken the lead in green regulation.
“About a decade ago, China probably came to a more realistic set of conclusions about sustainability than any other country,” says Mr Porritt. Its leaders looked at issues such as energy, air quality and water pollution, and realised things had to change.
“China is very clear: it needs to de-carbonise its economy,” he notes. The country is now the world’s biggest investor in renewables, with its successful solar sector and resulting low prices having benefited other countries too.
What about the other global superpower with a strikingly different environmental stance?
Mr Porritt admits that it “does not help” that US President Donald Trump denies the extent of man-made contributions to climate change and has pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement.
“But it’s much less of a problem than some people think,” he adds. “The real politics of climate change in the US has moved to the city and state level.”
More than 50 American city mayors, for instance, have pledged to deliver their equivalent of the Paris targets in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
And in the private sector, innovations have been changing market realities: “Renewables are getting cheaper and cheaper. People are very attracted by the idea of having cheaper forms of energy that don’t cause environmental damage.”
“There are so many smart businesspeople in America who can see that this is just the new operating norm. We’re going to have continuing prosperity but our prosperity will be low-carbon.”
THE BUSINESS CASE
Forum for the Future is not a campaigning body, Mr Porritt clarifies: “We don’t go out and advocate for change with politicians.”
Instead, it forms partnerships with organisations that are already keen to change and want guidance on doing so. “We work with the private sector and with civil society to accelerate solutions to these problems, and through practical interventions, actually make the change happen faster than it might do otherwise.”
This is distinct from previous approaches to corporate sustainability, Mr Porritt notes.
In earlier years, attempts to interest businesses in going green focused on appealing to their bottom line: “It was all based on what was called ‘the business case’.”
That consideration is still relevant, of course; there remains the obligation to do right by shareholders. What has changed, says Mr Porritt, is a more nuanced concept of value.
“If you think that fiduciary duty means short-term profit maximisation at the expense of longer-term prosperity and security, then that’s one position to take,” he says.
“But a lot of businesspeople now are saying that actually isn’t really very clever, because what you do is undermine the conditions for creating prosperity in the longer term, indefinitely, for this generation and future generations.
“[They’re saying:] ‘So why don’t we optimise the company’s activities so that we provide good returns for shareholders [while] simultaneously working to protect our long-term prosperity?’”
Mr Porritt is clear that this is not some nebulous feel-good notion: “It doesn’t have to be that abstract.”
If anything, a lack of rigour is what keeps firms from taking the enlightened view. “A lot of the problems come back to the fact that we don’t use very intelligent accounting systems … and valuation mechanisms.”
Governments also are not very good at forcing companies to internalise the costs of their actions, he says.
Yet if they care about market efficiency, governments should require businesses to price in considerations such as carbon emissions and waste.
By making companies bear the cost of their environmental impact — thus giving them an incentive to minimise it — governments “could regulate to make long-term value-creation the norm rather than something that is still difficult”.
Corporate sustainability is also distinct from corporate social responsibility (CSR), in Mr Porritt’s view. “The difference is that we want those companies we’re working with to build a proposition in the marketplace that provides greater assurance about long-term profitability and resilience in the market, than short-term, conventional business behaviour partially mitigated by CSR.”
In other words, Forum for the Future wants businesses to fundamentally change their approach, rather than, say, offset carbon emissions by planting trees.
The first step is realising that many companies “prosper because they dump costs onto other people”, and thus becoming aware of these costs.
Mr Porritt gives the example of a major palm oil company, with which Forum for the Future works to identify the real costs associated with its environmental impact — on biodiversity, water and the climate, for instance.
“Once you put a money value on that, then you’ve got an opportunity to say you need to find ways of addressing this, because it won’t always be the case that you’ll be allowed to dump these costs [onto others].”
Furthermore, the palm oil trade is itself very vulnerable to climate change. A critical determinant of commercial success is yields — which are affected by factors such as rainfall, temperature and the timing of the seasons.
“We will always link the advice that we give to how that affects a company’s success in the market. Because if you’re not doing that, you’re not really helping them understand the significance of this longer-term proposition.”
Of course, one company alone cannot stop climate change. That explains the need for collaborations such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which aims to lift standards across the whole sector.
The good news, says Mr Porritt, is that many sectors are already looking at what it means to produce in a low-carbon way: from aviation, shipping and transport to construction and electricity.
“Even the financial services sector … is sort of beginning to get the sense that returns will come from investing in companies that are good at low-carbon prosperity, rather than companies that couldn’t care less about it and just continue to cause the damage that they historically have always done.”
Though his work with Forum on the Future is necessarily hard-nosed and calibrated for capitalists, Mr Porritt’s own stance goes further.
“My personal belief is that we need more radical political positions brought to bear on the status quo and on some of the big overarching assumptions about politics today,” he says. “Including, for instance, that we will always have exponential economic growth indefinitely into the future.
“Well, sorry, you’d have to tell people — we won’t. You can’t have permanent economic growth on a finite planet. So eventually we’re going to have to find a different way of creating prosperity for people that isn’t based on today’s model of growth.”
The importance of sustainability is brought home even more clearly in his personal capacity. The future has greater significance for those with more time left on the planet than he has: the young people whom he meets, for instance, as chancellor of Keele University — and his two daughters, aged 29 and 27.
“I look at their prospects for the future and I can see all the time that what we’re doing today is going to impact increasingly negatively on their life chances and their prospects,” he says. “And that’s because of the way we continue to abuse our planet and refuse to acknowledge the reality of climate change.”
Some might see a contradiction in being a radical in the Green Party and working with huge multinationals, but Mr Porritt sees no tension there.
“If you choose not to work with a critical part of society, how does that make you more true to your radical beliefs?” he asks rhetorically.
“I don’t feel any compromise at all in working with big business. It’s still a critical part of the sustainability movement that we work with, not against, companies to accelerate that change.”
Conversely, while he is now “more focused on the very practical work than on the political work”, he does not dismiss his years spent active in politics or at Friends of the Earth.
“I don’t regret a single minute of it. But I know, right now, I can use some of that experience more effectively by bringing these arguments to bear with senior business leaders or politicians.”
[Surveys have shown that] the percentage of consumers willing to ‘change their lives’ to reflect environmental concerns is rarely more than 15%. With that level of personal commitment to live differently, it’s not enough to change the system
There are so many smart businesspeople in America who can see that [a sustainable growth strategy] is just the new operating norm. We’re going to have continuing prosperity but our prosperity will be low-carbon