Business Success in a Changing Climate

Yesterday I went to EcoFair14, an exhibition and conference with six parallel presentation streams. It was great to meet friends and make new contacts; to see established products and find out what has been developing over the last year.

My first session was Business Success in a Changing Climate by John Chubb of yourclimate.org  Rather than business success, he was talking about business resilience which of course is equally important. He started with the statistic that 80% of organisations without emergency continuity plans never fully recover from a disaster. And he reminded us that there had been severe weather incidents every year since 2000 in the UK. We've seen freezes, floods, water shortages and heatwaves. In that time the Great Yorkshire Show had to be abandoned and there was the East Coast surge; ice and snow closed roads, schools and businesses and some agricultural crops were wiped out. What is certain is that extreme weather events will be more frequent in the future and a move to a low carbon economy won’t change it. We can expect warmer, wetter winters; hotter, drier summers and it’s far cheaper to prepare than to react. (Didn’t Lord Stern say something like that back in 2006?)

John gave us case studies: the chemicals firm that moved its IT to the first floor and its electrics to the roof, bolted down its bulk tanks to stop them floating away and built a bund to keep all but the worst of the water out. He told us about the plant hire company that was unable to hire out pumps in a flood because its own premises were under water. A firm that survived - but only just.

Resources

John gave us all his excellent guide to Weathering the Storm. If you contact him via yourclimate.org maybe he’ll send you one. He pointed us to the Association of British Insurers, which publishes advice on flood prevention and also looks at the future from an insurance point of view https://www.abi.org.uk/Insurance-and-savings/Topics-and-issues/Join-the-debate/Identifying-the-challenges-of-a-changing-world If you want to know if you’re in a flood risk area the Environment Agency has the answer: https://www.gov.uk/prepare-for-a-flood . Sometimes we get a heatwave which can be dangerous for the elderly and very young and can cause problems at work. More advice from the NHS: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Summerhealth/Pages/Heatwave.aspx and from the Health and Safety Executive: http://www.hse.gov.uk/temperature/  You can assess your business resilience at businessresiliencehealthcheck.co.uk from Business in the Community. There are Local Resilience Forums, where businesses can get together to assess risks and work together to meet them. This is the one on the Humber: heps.gov.uk 

John’s final points were that customers increasingly need to know that their suppliers are secure. (See my Green Supply Chain workshop!) The impacts of extreme weather are neither equal nor fair.

A great start to the event. More about other presentations to follow.

They think it's all over

Latest reports from the IPCC, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that a 2 degree rise in world temperatures is inevitable – within 10 years. There is now so much excess carbon dioxide in the global system that it is too late to stop this happening; there’s nothing we can do. It’s time to face up to the consequences and prepare to adapt to them.

Ironically the prosperous West may benefit form the temperature rise in the short term. Higher temperatures will mean substantially increased crop yields in North America, Northern Europe and Russia. Elsewhere the opposite is true. In some parts of the Third World flash floods will wash the crops from the fields and destroy buildings, bridges and roads. Rising sea levels will make other places uninhabitable – already parts of the Maldives have had to be abandoned.

Too much water in some places; too little elsewhere as the Himalayan glaciers melt and the rivers they fill run dry. Up to a billion people will lose their water supply. Many species will become extinct and diseases will appear in places where they have never been seen before.

All this sounds apocalyptic. Too dreadful to be true. Turn the page – let’s not think about it. And what can we do about it anyway? And there on the next page is an advertisement from the energy company Total. “Total is pursuing the development of gas fields across the globe…” And burning more gas releases more CO2. Three degrees? Four degrees? Six degrees?

It needs government action. It needs big business to take action. What we can do is be aware of what is going to happen and be aware of how it will change our lifestyles. We need to do as much as we can to cut our individual carbon footprints. We can change public opinion. Enough public opinion influences government and changes business behaviour.

Within 10 years. That means it won’t just affect our children or our grandchildren. It’s going to affect us.

Save it!

We all know that we need to save energy to save the planet. What most people don’t realize is that everything we eat, use or wear involves the use of energy and indirectly causes carbon dioxide emissions. One of the things we take least notice of is water, particularly in the UK where many households still pay a fixed fee for their water, regardless of how much they use. Of course, commercial premises and more and more homes are on metered supplies, but the cost of water, at least at present, is ignored by most people.

One cubic metre of water requires 1kWh of electricity or other energy to pump it, filter it, purify it, and deliver it to the consumer. Every cubic metre of water therefore has a carbon footprint. Although Britain has been suffering from floods in recent weeks, droughts and hose pipe bans are becoming more and more common in the summer and if we do experience the weather extremes as predicted, water shortages can only get worse.

With this in mind I was interested to see the Interflush device at a conference at York University. This is a simple way of varying the amount of water which is used to flush the lavatory. Although there are some dual-flush units, most flushing systems deliver a full cistern of water every time. The same amount of water is used whether liquids or solids need to be flushed away. The Interflush adapts the traditional flushing siphon so that the flow stops as soon as the handle is released. At the level of the individual household, the savings are relatively small. However, we know that if each household fitted a single compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) electricity demand would fall by the equivalent of the output of a whole power station. Similarly, if every household adopted an Interflush the carbon footprint of the water industry would be cut by 250,000 tons of CO2 . The cost of water would be reduced for all consumers and the existing infrastructure would be able to cope with an increase in the number of consumers without upgrading.

Have a look at the website and see what you think!

Heavy Weather

Climate change and global warming. Many people think we can look forward to more of the same only warmer, and particularly for those of us in the UK the prospect of warmer summers can’t be bad. The truth is that climate change is climate destabilisation, and the experts predict more unusual, more unseasonable and more violent weather.

Are we now seeing the evidence? Across a major part of the United States there are serious droughts. Droughts have gone on for so many years in parts of Australia that the government is planning to evacuate whole communities from areas that have become totally unviable. Then just this week, in the wine-growing Hunter Valley, another part of Australia, there have been torrential storms, flash floods, property damage and fatalities.

Last week there was a cyclone, though in the UK at least we heard little about it. It caused serious property damage and a number of people lost their lives. The scary thing about this cyclone, though, is not that it’s perhaps a bit early but that it occurred not in the US or Australia but in the Persian Gulf. They just don’t get cyclones there, but it tore through Muscat and Oman – you can see pictures of the damage in this blog.

Experts in climate change have mapped the weather over thousands of years, so it’s impossible to say whether the events of the last three or four years are evidence of a new trend. Even so, these storms are not inconsistent with the unpredictable, violent weather that climate change could bring. They may be a taste of things to come!

One Billion Climate Refugees

One of the consequences of climate change that the IPCC report has noted since the beginning is the problem of refugees.

We generally live in a stable climate and although there's a wide range of difference between the equator and the poles, we usually find people who think the place where they live is "not too hot - not too cold." As climate change destabilises weather patterns there are places which will become uninhabitable. Places like Egypt and Bagladesh will suffer from floods as sea levels rise. Other places will suffer from drought and desertification as the rains fail. Either way, these places will no longer support crops, livestock or people. People must move to find somewhere to survive.

Even in prosperous Australia the drought has gone on so long that the government is seriously considering evacuating whole communities.

The IPCC has estimated the number of refugees at 3m per year. That's 150m by 2050. Just yesterday Christian Aid published its report "Human Tide". It predicts 1,000,000,000 refugees by 2050; that's 1,000m

The message is clear - we must do what we can about climate change. This means cutting our CO2 emissions, but let's be in no doubt - that may stop things getting worse, but it will take a time for it to have an effect. In the meantime we need to be ready for the floods and forest fires with defences and rescue plans. We need to stop people being displaced, but if they do become refugees we need plans and locations for resettlement.

There's no doubt that there's a climate crisis - and no end to the different problems it throws up!