Delivering environmental sustainability
06/07/08
Jonathan Smales has spent over 20 years working in sustainability, working with a number of various associations, conducting and participating in urban renaissance, place-making and masterplanning exercises for regeneration areas and new communities.
In the last five years Jonathan has researched and written the sustainable development strategy for both the Housing Corporation and CABE, helped found the Government's climate change communications initiative and published papers on principles and processes for sustainable regeneration and housing.
Jonathan, who has been working on sustainability for over 20 years, describes himself as an old-fashioned environmentalist. 'At Greenpeace we introduced our first climate change campaign in 1987. What we were saying then, the world's leaders and scientists are saying now. But what have we achieved since then?'
To give the audience some context, Jonathan first quoted the diplomat, environmentalist and academic, Sir Crispin Tickell's definition of sustainable development - 'Living on the planet as if we intended to stay.'
According to the World Wildlife Fund's recent Living Planet Report (2006), the natural world is being degraded 'at a rate unprecedented in human history'. It warned that if demand continued at the current rate, two planets would be needed to meet global demand by 2050. And if the world's population shared the UK's lifestyle, three planets would be needed to support their needs.
'But the situation is much worst - the world economy is growing at 2.5% a year and the world's population will increase from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2040. The compound effects of both on the biosphere will be ten times greater in 2050 than 2000. It's an astonishing challenge - no-one can think of a historical precedence. We're consuming more resources daily that we ever have before.'
Jonathan then explained the five tectonic stresses on the planet, according to Richard Heinberg's book, 'Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines'.
- Population stress arising from differences in the population growth rates between rich and poor societies, and from the spiralling growth in megacities in poor countries.
- Energy stress, which is increasing with the scarcity of oil.
- Environmental stress from the worsening damage to our land, water, forests and fisheries.
- Climate stress from changes in the makeup of our atmosphere.
- Economic stress resulting from instabilities in the global economic system and ever-widening income gap between rich and poor people.
According to UNEP's Earth Audit published last year, the world's population has grown by 34% to 6.7 billion in 20 years and by 700 million in the last seven years. 73,000 km² of forest is lost each year (that 3½ times the size of Wales), 60% of world's major rivers are dammed or diverted and freshwater fish populations have declined by 50% in 20 years. In addition to this, half of all cities exceed the World Health Organisation's pollution guidelines and 60% of our ecosystems are degraded or used unsustainably.
'Climate change is the big elephant in the room.'
More statistics - Ethiopians each produce 0.06 tonnes of carbon pa, a citizen of the China produces on average 2.7 tonnes and a UK citizen emits 9.5 tonnes. 'Where's the justice?' asked Jonathan. 'Because it was quickest to the industrial revolution and has been richer and more wasteful for longest the UK is responsible for 25% of all of the anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere.'
'We have to address our lifestyle - we're outrageous wasters in the UK. At Beyond Green we have a saying: sustainable development is easy, you just have to do everything differently.'
Jonathan reminded us that every new house, neighbourhood and eco-town is adding carbon. 'They probably have to be better than carbon neural. And there's no way of achieving this without changing our lifestyles.'
He drew on the example of Vancouver which has managed to get its public sector emissions down by 5% since 1990, although all emissions from the city as a whole are up by 5%. 'Vancouver is seen as the poster child for globally sustainable cities and it still has a long way to go.'
Sustainability requires a sea change in professional team cultures, land economics, financial modelling, town planning, urban design and architecture, green infrastructure, accessibility and movement, notions of local economy and 'regeneration', food and farming, retailing/shopping, integration, public/private partnerships, ownership and management of the public realm, stakeholder involvement, social justice, energy generation and use, and culture and lifestyle... 'Take any one of these out and the whole thing might be undermined.'