send via emailCopenmind conference highlights the difficulty of being green
Making good decisions about green issues is a complex and sometimes contradictory discipline, according to speakers at the first Copenmind conference, held in Copenhagen in September 2008.
The conference, launched to foster partnerships between university and industry and to accelerate technology transfer, drew 1500 participants from around the world. It chose green issues as its first theme.
Connie Hedegaard, Danish minister of climate and energy, outlined the challenge the world faces in her closing remarks.
“If global emissions are to peak in 10 to 15 years [as part of efforts to cut emissions by 2050] then the changes in our society can be compared to a new industrial revolution – a green one.”
She added that the global energy challenge included increasing demand, unstable suppliers, declining fossil fuel supplies and the prospect of running out of oil and gas.
We need to take energy efficiency more seriously. This is the challenge of our generation
“We’re forced to find sustainable alternatives,” she said. “We need to integrate renewables and take energy efficiency more seriously. But these are tremendously difficult tasks. This is the challenge of our generation.”
Hedegaard acknowledged the private sector’s role in tackling the issue: “The low-carbon economy is extremely dependent on the private sector investing in the development of clean technologies.”
Other speakers pointed out the importance of taking a holistic view of measures to tackle climate change, in everything from policy decisions to the impact of individual initiatives. It’s important to ensure that policy-makers co-ordinate their actions, and that incentives are carefully thought out.
Reshaping the building industry
Tareq Emtairah, a research associate from the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics at Lund University in Sweden, pointed out the importance of the building industry in climate change, and the difficulties of making it more climate friendly. He said that the energy used in building accounts for 40% of total energy use in the EU, and that the building sector contributes 40% of the EU’s CO2 output.
“In economies where there is little industry, buildings can be considered the major users of energy,” he said.
Emtairah said that the improvement in the energy efficiency of homes in Nordic countries has slowed down and even reversed in some cases.
“Why aren’t we advancing as we were before? The best technologies available since the 1980s are used in about 40% of newly built homes. We have technically and economically viable solutions – why haven’t they been adopted? Is it an issue of technology diffusion and if so what is the dynamic at work here?
“In some cases, subsidies [to encourage the uptake of green building methods] have destroyed the market.”
The traditional analysis of the building industry suggests that on the demand side there is a lack of awareness, difficulties in evaluating performance, and split incentives – because the organisation that invests in green technology during the build doesn’t end up paying a user’s energy bill.
Emtairah says there are various reasons why the building industry doesn’t do more to combat climate change. It’s fragmented, with many players making decisions about the adoption of new technologies. Different parts of the value chain have different abilities to absorb change, and different incentives for doing so. Public procurement and the public housing stock can both slow the uptake of change. And it is also unclear who should lead that change – suppliers, developers or contractors.
The result is an industry with many actors, which affects the flow of information; a lack of project-based learning, because of the industry’s cyclic nature; and few incentives to take risk. Emtairah’s response is to suggest developing open standards to ease the adoption of new technologies; improving communications to share success stories; and spreading incentives more evenly through the value chain, for example by demonstrating that a new technique can save a construction company money.
You cannot sell energy efficiency on its own. It has to be bundled with other benefits
“You cannot sell energy efficiency on its own. It has to be bundled with other benefits,” he said. Policymakers, who create the industry’s context, need to facilitate knowledge flows, manage risks, ensure the supply of well-qualified people, and develop building codes to drive standards forward.
Rewiring the gadget industry
Electronic gadgets are another obvious target of green concerns. Arne Remmen, head of the department of development and planning at the University of Aalborg, pointed out the difficulties of making mobile phones more environmentally friendly. He said that neither consumers nor manufacturers were very interested in having green mobiles, with industry focusing on voluntary measures and governments applying relatively weak policies such as eco-labelling.
The innovation model of the mobile phone industry doesn’t help either, with phones being packed with extra features to sell otherwise unnecessary upgrades, demanding regular moves to more energy-hungry radio systems. The network equipment that connects our mobile phones is also often overlooked.
Remmen argued that the environmental policies applied to mobile phones so far have suffered because of a lack of understanding of the innovation dynamics of the industry. He said that some regulations - such as the RoHS legislation on dangerous materials and the EuP standards for the energy use of chargers - have had an effect, while some, such as the WEEE directive on recycling electronic waste, have not.
He concluded that the industry had seen little in the way of regulatory pull, from eco-labelling or public procurement initiatives; no market pull related to environmental performance; and limited self-regulation. He concluded: “Connecting people should be connecting policy instruments.”
Arja Mehtälä, director of environmental management for device R&D at Nokia, put the industry’s case. She argued that Nokia did care about the environmental impact of its phones, “because it’s the right thing to do, it’s part of the brand, and it creates opportunities for the brand.”
But she pointed out some hard truths about the environmental issues. For example, it would be possible to cut the standby power used in a mobile phone, which makes it warm even when it is not charging, to zero “but it might not make sense over the whole life cycle of the charger”. The energy cost of the additional components could outweigh the energy savings made during its lifetime of use.
Similarly, she said that there are materials that can be recycled from mobile phones, such as the precious metals used to make long-lasting electrical connections, “but the volumes are small and there is an energy cost to doing it.”
She also argued that the integration of functions in mobile phones reduces electronic waste by reducing the number of devices we carry, as well as, in the case of phones with internet access, providing a tool with which we can live our lives in a more energy-conscious way.
Aligning incentives
One of the strongest themes of the conference was the power of incentives to align people and organisations with efforts to tackle climate change. Two examples showed the same approach being taken at radically different scales.
WWF, the global conservation organisation, used the Copenmind conference to launch a low-carbon city index. It argues that although there have been other efforts to measure the CO2 impact of individual cities, their measures have given an incomplete of the true impact of a city on the environment. It is easy for one city to appear green if it is exporting all its environmentally damaging activities to somewhere else and importing all its carbon-producing needs from somewhere else.
Why do we need a low carbon cities index? Stefan Henningsson, program director for climate change at WWF Sweden pointed out that 70% of the world’s carbon came from urban environments. China is seeing 10m people a year moving to its cities. And urbanisation may have reached 75% of the world’s population by 2050.
“We need to make urban planning decisions up front to get the fastest reduction in CO2,” he added.
The low carbon city index will focus on three aspects of a city’s carbon footprint: its direct emissions; the carbon created by the goods and services it imports; and the carbon impact of the things it exports, wherever they are consumed.
There are general indicators as well, such as whether a city has someone in charge of reducing CO2 emissions, for example through public procurement policies.
“We want to find an index that can show in a fairly easy way where the city is heading,” said Henningsson. “The indicators should be transparent, verifiable and accurate.”
John Kornerup Bang, head of the globalisation programme at WWF Denmark, said the index should focus on transformational change, “initiatives that can make profound structural changes in the way that the city and the economy works”. He gave the example of accelerating the uptake of video conferencing to reduce the number of journeys people need to make for meetings.
Rajendra Kumar, senior district collector [governor] of the Tiruvallur district of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, said his district was using ICT to help reduce its dependence on traditional industries as well as to become more green. The district’s civil service is now providing more of its services electronically to reduce the number of trips people need to make to get documents such as birth and death certificates
Pan Jiahua, executive director of the Research Centre of Urban Development and Environment at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that China needed to push low-carbon development in a more innovative way. He suggested the country could set up low-carbon development zones in a similar way to its creation of Special Economic Zones in the 1980s, which drove China’s re-entry into the global economy.
He said that the good thing about the low-carbon cities index was that “just like the Olympics, everyone will want to be a winner - is Copenhagen better than Beijing or Moscow? It will create a competitive environment through which low-carbon cities will be achieved.”
What none of the speakers mentioned was the unintended impact such an index, and the effect of any policies put in place to achieve a good ranking on it, might have. The law of unintended consequences is at the heart of most politics and policymaking – there’s no reason to think it will not apply here.
Getting personal
If creating an index can prompt cities to restructure themselves to reduce their carbon impact, perhaps a similar approach can get individuals to change their behaviour to produce less carbon. Andreas Zachariah is developing a product which he hopes will do exactly that. His company Carbon Hero is developing a piece of software to run on GPS enabled smartphones. It uses regular position updates provided by the satellite navigation capabilities of these phones to estimate how quickly someone is moving, and therefore to infer what type of transport they are using and the likely carbon impact of their journey.
The software has been developed for the Nokia N Series phones, and Zachariah is seeking funding to develop a version for the Blackberry because of the “incredible demographic” of Blackberry users. He believes that the software could help companies start managing the carbon footprint of their employees, as well as providing a way for children to compete about how green they are.
“The software creates an incredible continuous feedback loop,” he said.
Perhaps very direct mechanisms like this will provide the most effective way of understanding the complexities of being truly green.