A Practical Take On Sustainability
Capitalism is both the biggest challenge, and the greatest opportunity for achieving the sustainable changes we need.
Climate change is a scientific certainty.
The SSP scenarios project physical changes - from temperature rises between 1°C and 2°C in the near term and 2°C to 5°C in the longer term, with consequences ranging from agricultural and ecological disasters occurring between 2 to 4 times more frequently1, to land loss due to sea rise2.
What is harder to quantify is how this will affect society. The world is a highly complex interconnected system3, where changes in ecology could have unpredictable effects on the economy and societal welfare.
As no man is an island, all will feel the impact.
Unfortunately, no man is an island also enables the tragedy of the commons. Shareholder primacy4 encourages costs to be commonised (to all of us) and profits to be privatised (to a select few). The current obligation is immediate profit for shareholders, as "someone else can fix the mess later".
The flip side of capitalism is that the consumer holds ultimate power - via the freedom to choose. What if we go beyond carbon attribution - to holding individual consumers accountable? Moving from comparing CO2eq between companies to illustrating the human cost:
From: "…this phone caused 100kg of CO2eq."
To: "…this phone will contribute to the flooding of 5m^2 over the next ten years and contribute to 0.25 cases of lung cancer (air pollution5)."
The topic of (systemic) structural versus (individual) behavioural change always pops up in sustainability discussions, with opinions falling into one of two buckets:
Structural Change
For example: The government should step in and mandate change on the assumption that compliance is sufficient.Behavioural Change
For example: Empowering and relying on the individual to decide, on the assumption that most of humanity is inherently "good".
I believe that in western societies, structural change for sustainability will be met with insurmountable resistance. For structural change to work, we are effectively expecting liberal society to embrace a degree of communism - with the government controlling both means of production (how we create value sustainably) and individual consumption (how we consume value sustainably). Philosophical debates aside, it would be unrealistic to expect this approach to succeed.
How can we implement impact calculations?
We know the outcomes of current models, the processes that contribute to the outcomes, and the inputs - therefore we can understand how individual contributions (e.g. a mobile phone through Life Cycle Analysis6) can contribute to outcomes.
The objective is not to say "by buying this specific phone, you will cause flooding of this house on the Cornwall coast next month", but to illustrate how seemingly insignificant individual decisions compounds into very material, and human outcomes.
To implement the impact calculations, businesses will need Scope 3 data. From personal experience, at the time of writing, most businesses do not have this, however, the market is heading in the right direction.
“…it’s all well and good, but some still won’t care.”
They may not - and that is fine.
We do not need unanimous agreement to take advantage of positive tipping points.
Forcing those who are unwilling, or unable (particularly pertinent in context of the current rise in cost of living) to pay more will not yield the results we are looking for.
The best we can do in a liberal democracy is to inform and trust.
Let's reduce the risk of adopting new business models for businesses; by changing the market itself.
pp.3~34. Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, et al. ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’. Cambridge, UK: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021.
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/glaciers-and-climate/estimating-glacier-contribution-to-sea-level-rise/
Example showing wide ranging impacts of COVID-19.
Sahin, Oz, Hengky Salim, Emiliya Suprun, Russell Richards, Stefen MacAskill, Simone Heilgeist, Shannon Rutherford, Rodney A. Stewart, and Cara D. Beal. ‘Developing a Preliminary Causal Loop Diagram for Understanding the Wicked Complexity of the COVID-19 Pandemic’. Systems 8, no. 2 (18 June 2020): 20. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems8020020.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2017/04/11/a-legal-theory-of-shareholder-primacy/
“…outdoor air pollution causes roughly 1 in 10 cases of lung cancer in the UK”:
https://www.crick.ac.uk/news/2022-09-10_scientists-reveal-how-air-pollution-can-cause-lung-cancer-in-people-who-have-never-smoked
Great example showing LCA applied in the real world.
Yan, Xiaoyu, Sarah Ward, David Butler, and Bébhinn Daly. ‘Performance Assessment and Life Cycle Analysis of Potable Water Production from Harvested Rainwater by a Decentralized System’. Journal of Cleaner Production 172 (January 2018): 2167–73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.11.198.
Photo by Tom Wilson on Unsplash