Sustainable Futures: What should organisations in Vietnam be doing to mitigate the impact of climate change?

Sustainable Futures:What should organisations in Vietnam be doing to mitigate the impact of climate change?

Professor Jeremy B. Williams

Acting Director

Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise

Griffith Business School

Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise

1. Finding a safe operating space for human existence

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Source: Daly, H.E. (2005) ‘Economics in a full world’, Scientific American, September, p. 102.

Chinese proverb: “Better to give a man a rod than a fish”

… the supply of fishing rods is no longer the problem

It is a shortage of trees, not chainsaws, that threatens timber production

15 football pitches per day

Image source: nationalgeographic.com

• Water itself has become scarce relative to the powerful pumping technologies used to access it

The Aral Sea once the fourth largest lake in the world, continues to shrink and is now 10 percent of its original size

January 2013: Beijing air pollution off the scale

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Image source: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

Paul Hawken

‘You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.’

Good or bad for GDP?

2. The climate change ‘debate’

Source: nationaljournal.tumblr.com

James L. Powell (author of The Inquisition of Climate Science) reviewed 13,950 peer-reviewed papers published between January 1991 and early November 2012, and only 24 (0.17%) clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming.

IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

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Source: http://www.21school.ox.ac.uk/news/archive/200702_inaugural_lecture.cfm

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Upsala Glacier, Argentina

1928

2004

Blomstrandbreen Glacier, Norway

1922

Blomstrandbreen Glacier, Norway

2002

The Imja Glacier, Himalayas

The Imja Glacier, Himalayas

New colours on the temperature map

January 2013

October 2012: Superstorm Sandy

Anhui Province, China, August 2006

Southeastern China, February 2011

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Floods in Southern China, June 2011, 550,000 left homeless

1 metre sea level rise will inundate more than 15 percent of Bangladesh, displacing more than 13 million people

3. The carbon budget

http://co2now.org/

Dr. Malte Meinshausen

Meeting the Cancun Agreement commitment

International commitment to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels

Meinshausen et al calculated that to reduce the chance of exceeding 2°C warming to 20%, the global carbon budget for 2000-2050 is 886Gt CO2

Deducting emissions from the first decade of this century, leaves a budget of 565Gt CO2 for the 40 years to 2050

At the present rate of consumption, the 2000-2050 carbon budget will be exceeded around 2024

In 1750 (before the growth of fossil fuels) there was 2 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. If we extracted it from the air, this the total volume of that gas. (At standard pressure and 15°C the cube is over 65 miles across.)

Since 1750 we have added another 1.5 trillion tons

Nearly 1 trillion tons of the carbon dioxide we have added is still in the atmosphere. The rest has dissolved in the oceans or been absorbed by plants and microbes.

Warming the planet by more than 2°C risks run-away climate change, and catastrophe for life on Earth. If we add any more than half a trillion tons we will exceed 2°C.

When we add up the declared reserves of fossil fuel companies, it turns out they are equivalent to 2.8 trillion tons of carbon dioxide. This is fuel we cannot afford to use.

“This shows that the fossil fuel companies have five times more carbon in their reserves than even the most conservative governments think would be safe to burn” – Bill McKibben

July 2011

The carbon budget for the 40 years to 2050 is 565Gt CO2

All of the proven reserves owned by private and public companies and governments are equivalent to 2,795Gt CO2

Only 20% of the total reserves can be burned unabated, leaving up to

80% of assets technically unburnable

http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/08/Unburnable-Carbon-Full1.pdf

4. Becoming climate resilient

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“The Virgin Earth Challenge”… USD25 million prize if you can develop “a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate”.

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Marine cloud whitening?

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This design does not qualify apparently …

Going about our business naturally

Radical resource productivity

Biomimicry

Investing in natural capital

Service and flow economy

www.naturalcapitalism.org

Radical resource productivity

Using resources more efficiently in ways that can already be achieved; e.g. process redesign (disembodied technical change) or energy efficient buildings, passive solar heating.

Research biomimicry

Spider silk Abalone shell

Stenocara beetle

Invest in natural capital

The service and flow economy

The sustainable development journey

H.E. Mr. Nguyen Cam Tu, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry & Trade

reduce poverty ensure gender equality and social welfare protect natural resources; and raise public awareness of climate change adaptation

Nguyen Minh Quang,Minister of Natural

Resources and Environment

‘For the purpose of attaining freedom in the world of nature, man must use natural science to understand, conquer and change nature and thus attain freedom from nature.’

Speech at the inaugural meeting of the Natural Science Research Society of the Border Region (February 5, 1940).

Chairman Mao

Long term prosperity needs resilience not just efficiency

The key to sustainability lies in enhancing the resilience of communities, not in optimising isolated parts of the system

Need to think in terms of social-ecological systems

Build in redundancy to stay within known thresholds

Walker & Salt (2006)

profjeremybwilliams

@TheGreenMBA @jeremybwilliams