It’s been a good week for carbon pricing. On Monday, a Nielsen poll suggested 54 per cent of Australians haven’t felt a negative impact since it was introduced. And yesterday afternoon came news that the government would link the Australian emissions trading scheme to the European Union scheme, which has been in operation since 2005.

This was not a surprise – the Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, foreshadowed the link at the COP17 Climate Conference in Durban in December. However, this announcement has the potential to further swing public opinion around to the idea that carbon pricing is not so bad after all.

Most of the media response has focused on the removal of the floor price. When the carbon ”tax” ends and the emissions trading scheme kicks in on 1 July 2015, the 200 or so Australian companies with a liability under carbon pricing have two options: reduce emissions themselves, or buy from others.

The floor price was designed to guarantee a minimum payment to these sellers. Now that it is gone, reducing emissions will be cheaper, at least in the short term, for Australian companies. They will be able to source credits from Europe, which yesterday were trading at $9.80 per tonne. They should be happy. So too should other Australians, because the cost to the economy of meeting Australia’s emissions target just came down.
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However, the longer-term public relations boost to the government comes from the link with the EU. The climate debate in Australia has been bedevilled since the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 by the claim Australia is too far ahead of other countries in dealing with the issue – that we are doing more than our fair share.

Other countries do price carbon. For example, parts of China are trialling emissions trading, as are parts of the US, and India has a carbon tax on coal. In fact, 30 per cent of the global economy will be covered by emissions trading by 2013. This has been lost in the debate, not least because Australia’s floor price made it one of the more expensive schemes around. However, now that it will effectively be synchronised with emissions trading in 30 countries, it will not be possible to mount the argument that we are going it alone. From a public relations perspective, this may be the single biggest benefit of the announcement.

Other aspects of the announcement are interesting from a PR perspective too. Why did the government choose to drop this good news now? Would it not have made sense to negate some of the more furious criticism about the cost of the scheme a few weeks ago? The timing of the announcement may have been planned, or it may simply have been that the negotiations with the EU did not reach a conclusion until now. Whether it was deliberate or not, the timing could not have been better.

The carbon price is in place, as is the sky. Australians are beginning to question whether the policy will actually cost them that much at all. Power bills for the first period to include carbon pricing have mostly not yet arrived. The government is making the most of this window – while critics of the scheme are feeling under pressure – to deliver another punch: it’s going to be cheaper than you thought, and we are falling into line with the rest of the world (or at least 30 other countries).

Added to this, governments tend to avoid reneging on agreements they have reached with other countries, regardless of who was in power at the time of the agreement. Some might argue it was reckless to commit the country to an approach predicated on a policy that the Opposition Leader has made clear he would like to repeal. There are no legal impediments to walking away from this deal with the Europeans if the scheme is repealed – but it’s not a good look.

There are negative aspects to the move. It’s bad news for some hardened climate activists, who support climate action but not emissions trading. It’s also potentially bad news for those who support preserving tropical forests as a means of storing carbon, as the EU does not accept these credits into its scheme.

But there can be little doubt this announcement has been a PR win for the government. In June, the Climate Institute, a think tank, released polling showing only 44 per cent of Australians believed the Coalition would repeal carbon pricing if they won power. This number must now surely drop further. Carbon pricing just got more difficult to dislodge.

Author: Andrew Ure, MD OgilvyEarth

This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 29 August 2012.

By Andrew Ure, MD OgilvyEarth

This article first appeared in Renew Economy on 22 August 2012

Following the frenzy of commentary around the introduction of carbon pricing into the Australian economy on July 1, there has been a striking drop-off in coverage of the issue. With the sky firmly in place, and legs of lamb still in the weekly shopping basket, there has been relatively little to fan the flames of media interest.

One ember does remain: over the next three months, electricity bills will be arriving in households all over Australia. In NSW and Queensland, state governments have legislated to require bills to include a statement explicitly blaming the ‘federal carbon tax and green energy schemes’ for large cost hikes (a little naughtily, an annualised figure is used on the quarterly bills, and state-based policies are included). In any event, rising household energy costs appear to be shaping up as an attractive battleground for carbon critics over the next few months.

However, showing a media adeptness that has not always been evident over the past few years, the government has introduced a new dimension to the debate. With her landmark speech to the Energy Policy Institute on August 7, the Prime Minister went on the front foot.

She did not seek to downplay electricity price rises – she did the opposite, placing them centre stage, but laying the blame elsewhere, at the feet of Liberal state governments that have been “increasing their revenue at the expense of the family electricity bill”. Gillard said: “That has to stop”.

In reframing the debate to focus on the approximately 50 per cent of household power bills that goes on “poles and wires”, Gillard has reshaped this battleground. (Of course, it helps that all but two state governments are currently run by the Libs, even though ‘gold-plating’ is hardly a new phenomenon).

Regardless, a debate on rising energy costs, while not without drawbacks, plays into a key part of the Government’s mitigation agenda: the importance of energy efficiency. Could this long overlooked pillar of climate change policy finally have its turn in the sun?

There are reasons to believe it will. From an operational perspective one of these is obvious: the era of cheap energy is over, and energy efficiency can save households hundreds of dollars, and businesses anything up to millions of dollars, per year. However, energy efficiency also has a psychological advantage: unlike carbon pricing, you don’t need to believe in climate change to believe in energy efficiency. This means that there are no ideological obstacles to its uptake.

Some of the most vociferous opponents of action on climate change are making efforts to reduce their household’s energy use – in fact some describe this explicitly this as their ‘protection against the carbon price’. Companies that vocally opposed the introduction of carbon pricing have energy efficiency programs in place that saving tens of millions of dollars (and, as it happens, millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions).

Households and companies all over Australia can be encouraged to get on board with energy efficiency. Just don’t mention the C word. (In her speech, Gillard mentioned climate change just once, but I think she got away with it).

In fact, in practical terms, it may be best not to mention ‘energy efficiency’ either. The term is so broad as to have little meaning for the average Australian. Instead, proponents would do well to focus on articulating the benefits of specific activities – such as buying efficient equipment, or turning the TV off at the wall.

And this should be easier and easier as the media focuses on rising energy bills. In this context, initiatives such as the Telegraph’s One Big Switch campaign serve to help people understand that an energy bill is not something that happens to you: it is something you can influence. The more the media talk up the costs of energy, the more opportunities there are to educate Australians on how to use less of it.

The media cycle is about to provide energy efficiency with a chance to shine. The broad concept has bipartisan support. Efficiency measures can help households and businesses protect themselves against rising energy prices (including carbon price impacts). Those who are driven by the environmental benefits of energy efficiency should be delighted. They should be in love with One Big Switch. But for the moment, it’s probably best they stay in the closet. Energy efficiency is the climate fix that dare not speak its name.

Walking through my local supermarket last week, the dizzying aisles piled high with multi-coloured Easter bunnies and foil-wrapped chocolate eggs made it hard to imagine that I had just spent three days speaking with leading experts about potential food shortages and the inadequacies of our global food system.

The Second National Sustainable Food Summit in Sydney Australia brought to light the many unspoken pressures on our current food system that threaten to leave Australia, along with most other countries around the world, unable to feed their growing populations.

As I stared wide-eyed down the supermarket aisle, the conference speakers’ messages seemed terribly disconnected from the abundance overflowing in front of me.  Endless varieties of chocolate eggs had been tailored to delight even the most finicky of tastebuds.  Nowadays, consumers can have their chocolate treats in multiple shades: dark, milk, white or some combination of all three.  They can have them candy-coated, caramel –centred, miniaturised, orange-flavoured, hot, frozen, sugar-free, individually-wrapped or even family-packed.  This is not limited to just Easter goodies.  The average developed nation supermarket is brimming with an abundant variety of inexpensive food year-round.  So, it’s no wonder that most of us are not preoccupied with projected food shortages, dwindling seafood supplies or shrinking croplands on the agenda of the National Sustainable Food Summit.

The reality is, of course, that what see from our perch at our trolley’s handlebars is not the full picture.  Taking a long-term macro view reveals a world where exponential population growth will drive up demand for food production and a rising global middle class will increase the number of people able to afford animal protein (which we know takes more water and energy resources to produce than vegetables).  Additional pressure will also come from rapid urbanisation and the growing number of megacities (those with populations exceeding ten million) which will not only encroach upon fertile agricultural lands and add to the complexities of getting enough fresh food into cities fast enough to satiate our tummies, but also exacerbate the dramatic disconnect between our farmers and our plates.

When we see the big picture, we discover additional pressures on our food system that are telling us our current system needs a re-think.  Diminishing diversity in our basic crop species is putting our resilience at risk.  Predictability of crop production is being threatened, as increasingly irregular weather patterns throw off century-old agricultural practices (regardless of which side of the climate change debate you find yourself).  International trade is encouraging us to relinquish control of our food sources, as we increase our dependence on overseas ingredients and processing.  And the experts we rely on to produce our food are abandoning their vocations, as financial pressures from rising energy costs, industrialised food production and shrinking profit margins chase farmers from their fields to city jobs.  With something as vital as food, how is that we have found ourselves putting all of our eggs in one basket (no pun intended)?

Yet, in the face of this bleak reality, the conference was optimistic and solutions-focussed.  True, we cannot rely on old systems if we are to produce more food with fewer resources in the face of changing environmental conditions.  However, by working together across community, industry and politics, we can create viable solutions.  This was the resounding message that threaded throughout the three days of conference talks and workshops.

Experts pointed to specific technologies, policies, communities and case studies that might hold the answer.  Discussions pointed to concepts such as decentralised food production, urban farming, renewable energy, alternative food sources, cross-industry collaboration, consumer-driven system changes, meaningful partnership between NGOs and food suppliers, supply chain traceability, affordability and equity in food access, national food policies, nutritional requirements and cultural considerations of the role of food in society.

Already we can see evidence of big brands, government and community groups starting to work on solutions.  In Australia, one state government campaign is trying to teach people how to avoid letting perfectly good food go to waste with the Love Food Hate Waste initiative. Major Australian supermarkets Woolworths and Coles have each made sustainable seafood commitments and major seafood suppliers like John West are taking important steps to ensuring the sustainability of their supply.  Unilever is also taking serious steps to improve the sustainability of the food it sources, with its Lipton brand sourcing Rainforest Alliance certified tea and its commitment to move its Ben & Jerry’s brand to fair trade certified ingredients, for example.  Coca-Cola too is working with local communities and environmental groups to improve the sustainability of its ingredients, through Project Catalyst, which aims to make sugar cane in Australia agriculture more sustainable. Full disclosure here: several of my insights here come from the work that OgilvyEarth has done with Woolworths, Lipton, John West and Project Catalyst).

In each of these cases, the need for proactive collaboration between industries and sectors is critical to making progress.  With my sustainability communication hat on, I see the important role communication will play in enabling the kind of future thinking and real action we will need to change the course of our food system.  Already through my work with clients, I have seen how facilitated conversations and strategic communication can enable the kind of idea sharing, inspired collaboration, trust building and dialogue needed to improve on the status quo.   No, I don’t know exactly what our food secure future will look like.  But I do believe that it will require a combination of technical and policy solutions as well as a new system of values, cultural norms and perceptions to change how we think about the food we eat.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that we are living in a time of truncated oversimplification. Understandably, the tendency to want to reduce everything down to a sound bite is in reaction to the almost manic state of our 24/7 news cycles and multi-channelled communications feeds.  True that there is a time and place for boiling down a complicated idea to its essential concepts.  Yet, I fear that we have entered an era where important ideas risk getting overlooked entirely if they are not reduced to bullet points (having said that, I now wonder if I should also prepare a bullet point version of this blog post).   I have seen this  inclination to summarise messages within environmental and sustainability communications, and am worried that people are missing the type of ‘big-picture’, ‘long-term’ perspective so vital to devising sustainability solutions.  The fact is that, you simply cannot save the planet in “Ten easy steps” (I pause here for a moment to thank Annie Leonard, the creator of the fantastic viral video The Story of Stuff for reminding me of this last weekend when she delivered a talk in Sydney).

In my line of work, I am often faced with questions about how to best communicate sustainability messages.  Generally, people are expecting a quick, elevator-pitch response.  However, I usually reply with a question instead: “Who are you trying to communicate with, what are you hoping to communicate, and what do you want them to do with the information”?  Too often, I have found people tend to jump to the tactical solution stage of an implementation process before having properly sat down to ask enough questions to form a proper strategy.  Presented in this way, the majority of us easily agree that this is not an ideal way of communicating effectively, but you’d be surprised how many people skip the important preliminary steps.

Although communicating sustainability is sometimes most effective when messages are simplified down to snippets of information, I would argue that the majority of scenarios require a longer-term, more complex communications effort.  This is because a most people talking about sustainability are not just trying to get us to change the length of our morning showers, they are trying to do things like facilitate deep culture and behaviour change, improve eco-literacy or devise win-win solutions between opposing groups.  The reality is that it takes time to shift cultural norms and achieve long-term behaviour change, and if a communications strategy does not plan for phased-in or follow-up messaging, it is unlikely to achieve its desired objectives.

So, effective sustainability communications often requires a little more work at the outset and in the follow-up phases of a communications initiative.  Sustainability practitioners must remember that we need to take the time to understand our audiences and clarify our own objectives.  To change people’s hearts, minds and actions, we need to ask enough questions to properly understand what motivates them, what worries them, what their understanding of the issues is, how they like to communicate, who  they are influenced by, and so on.  Without this information, we can only hope that some of our one-way monologue cookie-cutter messaging actually sticks and has any positive effect.  Who knows? Perhaps after all this, we will still conclude that our audience only needs a list of “Ten top Tips” to save the planet.  But, without asking all these questions, how can we know which ten tips to give? I have yet to see a situation where communications does not require some degree of tailoring and customisation.  After all, communications is about connecting with people, and we humans are a complex and varied bunch that most certainly is not “one size fits all”.

Last week, I was invited to speak at the Campus Link Trade Show and Conference to share some insights into the role that effective communications can play in creating Sustainable Supply Chains.  As Sustainable Supply Chain Management continues to gain ground, the number of emerging evaluation tools, tips, criteria, grading systems and issue-areas is enough to send procurement teams’ heads spinning.  Too often this leads to organisations getting so caught up in the technicalities and questionnaires involved that they overlook the need to cooperate, collaborate and co-create solutions in order to develop Sustainable Supply Chains.  Instead of focusing on common objectives, conversations can turn into confrontational shouting matches where suppliers and buyers argue over details of environment policy requirements or customers and NGOs attack organisations for the way they source their products.  Ideally, procurement teams will learn to strike the right balance between technical evaluation tools and constructive conversations, so that business can continue to see the benefits of creating Sustainable Supply Chains.

The idea that companies share some degree of responsibility for the upstream impacts of supply chain is not new.   Corporate Responsibility and Sustainable Supply Chain ‘hot buttons’  like sweatshops, blood diamonds and dolphin safe tuna would have caught the attention of even the most casual of observers.  Until recently, it seemed that that these concerns were reserved for only the biggest brands and the largest suppliers.  Wal-Mart’s recent work to figure out how to improve the sustainability of its supply chain is a classic example of how negative attention has triggered big business to take responsibility for improving the sustainability of supply chains.

Nowadays, a growing number of smaller-scale suppliers and procurement departments are being pushed to start scratching their heads about Sustainable Supply Chains too.  As the field of ‘Sustainable Supply Chain Management’ matures, pressure from customers, shareholders, Boards and stakeholders has moved beyond big business and started targeting small and medium size companies as well.

In most cases, the challenge is twofold: firstly, these smaller procurement departments are usually less resourced to handle the additional task of managing a Sustainable Supply Chain. Secondly, they are entering the Sustainable Supply Chain conversation at a point that is much more complex and advanced than it was when bigger brands began discussing the issue several years ago.

So, for anyone still in the early stages of considering the sustainability of your supply chain, or for anyone who feel like you’ve hit a plateau and need a bit of inspiration, here are a few hints on how communications can help you deliver a Sustainable Supply Chain:

1. Figure out what “Sustainable” looks like to your organisation: “Sustainability” means different things to different organisations.  Find out what the sustainability impacts and considerations are for your organisation by talking with players in your industry, or with academics or specialist research organisations.  Try talking to NGOs who have approached you or your competitors in the past with concerns about your practices. You’ll either find an opportunity to show leadership by being a first-mover in this space, or you’ll save yourself time by learning from others’ experience.
2. Think beyond questionnaires and evaluation criteria: Evaluation tools are helpful tools, but sustainability requires big-picture thinking, so don’t get so caught up in the questionnaires and evaluation tools that you lose sight of the overall objectives.  Use regular and open conversations with industry members, stakeholders and customers to help get an outside perspective and use this insight to define your own path to sustainability.  This puts you in a proactive position instead of a reactionary one.
3. Start with ‘hot button’ issues: Chances are, you can’t deal with all of your Sustainable Supply Chain challenges at once. So, try starting with the ‘hot button’ topics most likely to draw negative attention or pose a reputational risk. Honest conversations with stakeholders and customers will help build a trusting relationship where you can listen to their concerns and in turn show them openly how you are trying to find a solution.
4. Measure and Communicate: Almost as important as improving the sustainability of your supply chain is measuring your progress and being able effectively communicate your achievements.  Make sure you are capturing the kind of information that allows you to tell the story of your continued efforts and progress. If your audiences can’t see all the work you’re doing, they’re more likely to kick up a fuss, which leaves you with the added task of managing a crisis on top of trying to figure out how to improve your sustainability impacts.  Remember to consider audiences both internal and external to your organisation. 
5. Talk about successes and weakness: The key to successful stakeholder engagement is building trust. Remember that no one trusts a boaster, so make sure you share successes and challenges along the way.

‘Sustainability’ is a topic that seems to come up a lot in my conversations.  Not surprising, considering that I am a sustainability communications advisor by day and the token ‘greenie’ in my personal life.  Perhaps a little more surprising however, is that for all the time I spend thinking and talking about ‘sustainability’, I still haven’t found a suitable one-size-fits-all definition for it.  Intuitively, one might think that a communications professional would have found a snazzy one-liner that fluidly rolls off the tongue.  I haven’t.

The challenge, of course, is that ‘sustainability’ is a notion that is constantly evolving within the context of our changing times, spanning across the realms of environment, politics, society, science, psychology, economics, ethics and beyond.  How one defines it, therefore, depends largely on who you are, who you are speaking to, and what point about ‘sustainability’ you are trying to get across.  Communications experts recognise the powerful, intensely personal and emotional nature of language.  So, when you are choosing the words to describe an issue as important as ‘sustainability’, you want to get right.

You can imagine my pleasure, therefore, when I found an alternative way of reframing the ‘sustainability’ conversation.  I came across it in a lecture entitled, “Sustainable Wellbeing – an Economic Future for Australia” that Australia’s Treasury Secretary, Dr. Martin Parkinson PSM, delivered this week at the University of Western Australia.

I am not suggesting that this is the silver bullet be-all and end-all of ‘sustainability’ definitions, but I do feel that Dr. Parkinson does a good job of encapsulating sustainability’s nuanced complexities. Using tangible examples to which people can readily relate, he offers a different way of illustrating the economic, social and environmental spheres so deeply entangled in the concept of ‘sustainability’.

In his lecture, Dr. Parkinson deliberately shifts away from defining ‘sustainability’ in purely environmental terms, instead describing the concept as ‘sustainable wellbeing’. Our personal finances, knowledge, skills, health, access to clean air and sense of community, among other things all factor into our ‘wellbeing’, he says.  In fact, in an overarching framework, he identifies four forms of capital as the productive base for ‘wellbeing’: (1) physical & financial capital, (2) human capital, (3) environmental capital and (4) social capital.  ‘Sustainable wellbeing’, therefore, occurs when one generation passes on as much of these four stocks of capital as it inherited in the first place. When we think about ‘sustainability’ in this light, its nuanced complexities become suddenly self-evident.   Dr. Parkinson also makes reference to the Australian Treasury’s “Wellbeing Framework”, which describes Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as merely a “proxy” measure of wellbeing, insisting that we need to be measuring more than increased income and consumption rates to assess levels of social welfare.

Encouragingly, Dr. Parkinson is not alone in this line of thinking.  The Kingdom of Bhutan is credited with coining the phrase Gross National Happiness (GNP) in the 1970’s, measuring its success based on its people’s happiness rather than GDP alone.   Under David Cameron in 2010, the United Kingdom announced its intentions to start measuring its citizens’ psychological and environmental wellbeing. Numerous others, like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), France, Canada and Germany are following suit investigating various forms of happiness, wellbeing and progress indices.  Add to that, the United Nations’ recent July announcement of an adopted resolution, acknowledging the need to place more importance on happiness and wellbeing in social and economic development policy.

I take these all as strong signs that the world is increasingly looking beyond just dollars and cents to assess success.  How we will assuage our compulsion to measure everything in hard numbers and figures has yet to be determined.  Quantifying the qualitative and assigning price tags to priceless necessities like air and social stability is a challenge sustainability professions have grappled with for years.  Yet, the growing dissatisfaction with our current models and definitions, together with the mounting recognition of the value of life’s intangibles, reassures me that we will eventually get to a place where I will no longer have to struggle to find the right words to define ‘sustainability’, because its meaning and significance will be self-evident.

This week I said goodbye to a man who has been one of the most influential thought-leaders in my life, Dr. Ray Anderson.  A chorus of voices around the world has echoed my farewell, rising up to remember the man who so profoundly shaped the conversation around the notion of ‘sustainable business’.  Dr. Anderson was nothing short of a visionary.  He was a true pioneer who proved that it is possible to build profit while pursuing sustainable business practices.  As he gained recognition for putting his principles into practice in his own company, Interface Inc., he committed himself to using his power of influence to encourage others to join the journey to sustainability.

Indeed, he had influenced my own journey, inspiring me to focus all my academic and professional work on making ‘sustainability’ an attractive and viable option for business. After devouring his book ‘Midcourse Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model’, I finally met Anderson in 2006 when I moved to Atlanta to join Interface’s Global Sustainable Strategy team.  The look in his eyes when he spoke brought life to the passionate call to action that had so gripped me in his book.  This man was for real.  Interface’s corporate vision is to help “leave this world a better place than how we found it”.   Ray Anderson believed it. We all did.  He was a hero to many of us working there, and he was mentor and hero to innumerable others beyond the immediate Interface community.

Indeed, recognition and praise for his achievements flowed in from all corners of the globe, from   the business, scientific and academic communities who acknowledged him for the courageous and practical way he put his dream into practice.  But this post is not about the long list of public awards and recognitions that Dr. Anderson earned over the years. Although to be sure, there are many.

Instead, I want to ensure that we remember the genuine conviction of his messages. Having met him myself, I want the world to know that these were not corporate spin.  His story of the ‘spear in the chest’ is real. His desire to turn the entire industrial system on its head is true. His insistence that we aim high, make ourselves big promises, yet stay honest about our shortcomings: all clear messages we heard regularly.

Self-described as a ‘radical industrialist’, many of Dr. Anderson’s ideas have now become well accepted truths almost fifteen years later. But there is still much work to be done.  Ray Anderson has left us big shoes to fill. It will take perseverance, courage, creative out-of-the-box thinking and new forms of collaboration to get us there.  I am determined to honour his memory by staying the path up ‘Mount Sustainability’ that he invited me to join so many years ago. I invite you to join me.  We are not alone on this journey, but we will need many more to reach the top.