Entec Bulletin
Changing Climate, Changing Attitudes

Consequence and Responsibility

In the foreword to Defra's five year strategy Delivering the Essentials of Life, the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs describe Defra as the "department for the essentials of life", delivering improvements in air, water, food and the countryside, to name a few. Its core purpose is to "improve the current and future quality of life" and the strategy points to a long list of significant achievements and a large programme of future measures. It says that all this will be achieved by a department that will be 60% smaller by 2008 than it was in 2001. Once again the top environmental threat is said to be climate change and the government will make it a priority for the UK's presidency of the EU and G8 in the second half of 2005.

Defra has set itself a huge task but are we winning these crucial arguments such as climate change? Behaviour change is one of the key planks of UK government policy on climate change - give people access to the right information, adjust prices to include external costs and people should surely change to a low carbon option. Right? Well maybe. Professor Tim Jackson's (Centre for Environmental Strategy, University of Surrey) recent paper Motivating Sustainable Consumption argues that these types of policies (based on rational choice theories) have led to limited success in changing unsustainable behaviours. Tim says that "Persuasion is particularly difficult in a message rich environment" and "…all too often there is a yawning gap between attitudes …and behaviour…". People are bombarded by information and messages and they often say one thing and do another. Do we even think about what we're doing or do habit and social norms (doing what everybody else does) play a large part in our choices? Tim thinks so and feels that policies need to address this issue of habit and norms. How can we persuade people, ourselves included, to think about the consequences of our actions and take responsibility for them?

In this context Defra has recently released the final report on a UK communications strategy on climate change. Produced by Futerra, the strategy is put forward as an attitude change and not a behaviour change strategy, seeking to alter current negative attitudes on climate change to more positive attitudes that will bring about change.

Futerra recommend that the UK develop a strong, understandable and inspirational BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal - pronounced bee-hag) for action on climate change, accompanied by a branded statement. The strategy will focus on local level communications and has funding of £12 million over the next few years. This is the type of innovative and refreshing approach we need on climate change.

The issues of consequence and responsibility need to be embedded not only at the individual level but also the corporate level. For instance, we're now in a position to begin to understand the consequences of the human contribution to climate change for businesses and the usual approach is to divide them into three categories - impacts, adaptation and mitigation. These are described in more detail in the table below.

This is a fairly conventional approach to analysing the risks and formulating a climate change risk management strategy. However, there's little evidence that many businesses are adopting this approach, understanding climate change consequence and taking responsibility for it. However, Geoff Lye and Francesca Muller from the consultancy and think tank SustainAbility detect another, more forceful trend. Their recent report The Changing Landscape of Liability - A Director's Guide to Trends in Corporate Environmental, Social and Economic Liability discusses some recent examples of corporate liability being pursued through litigation and speculates that these could soon be applied to climate change. What if companies responsible for large scale greenhouse gas emissions were pursued through the legal process for compensation? Far fetched? Think back to asbestos and tobacco. The total cost of asbestos claims to US and non-US insurers and corporations has been estimated at $200 billion. One leading tobacco company is estimated to be spending $600 million a year on lawsuits. To put this in a climate change context, the UN Environment Programme estimates climate change costs at $300 billion a year.

So are we facing a future where consequence and responsibility for climate change are a more direct influence on business than they have been so far? Maybe we've already seen a glimpse of the future. In July 2004 US lawyers filed a suit against five major power companies who they claimed were responsible for 10% of US CO2 emissions. Furthermore, what if a credible damage cost was assigned to each tonne of CO2 emitted and emitters had to pay it?

Bringing this home, some key questions for business now are:

• What are the potential impacts of climate change on my business?
• What are the consequences of my company emitting greenhouse gases - globally and locally?
• How do I demonstrate to my stakeholders (investors, customers, regulators, employees etc) that I understood the risk and managed it appropriately?
• How do I account for the risks on my balance sheet?
• How can my business move to a low/ no carbon strategy?

If we sincerely believe that climate change is our greatest environmental challenge then we have to answer these tough questions. Defra polices and programmes should help but all of us - individuals, companies and organisations - need to understand the consequences of our actions and take responsibility for them.

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