Examination of Witness (Questions 19-39)
26 MAY 2004
MR ANDREW
LEE
Chairman: Welcome, Mr Lee. I think you
heard my strictures at the beginning about time so if you could
keep your answers as brief as possible we will get through rather
more than otherwise. Colin Challen?
Q19 Mr Challen: I do not know if you
have heard of Professor Lester Brown who is an environmentalist
who recently published a book called Plan B, but in that
book he refers to President Roosevelt in the Second World War
who when faced with the challenge after Pearl Harbour told the
American motor industry that within 12 months they would stop
making cars and start making tanks, so it is possible to transform
society very quickly in the face of this great threat. Do you
think the scale of the threat now demands similar radical action,
perhaps a Marshall Plan-scale effort?
Mr Lee: I think it does but of
course the threat is very diffuse and this is always the difficulty
in terms of the environment. If it was a disease I would describe
it as a chronic issue rather than an acute one. If you look at
global climate change we know, never mind the extremes of The
Day After Tomorrow, what these scenarios may look like in
terms of the impact on this country or, for instance, the poorest
people in the world in many areas which will be threatened. It
is not so easy to bring it home graphically in the short term,
but the scale of change that is needed is as big. I think one
of the key issues we have to do with the definition of sustainable
development is to talk about what it is as well as what it is
not. There is a tendency to talk about sustainable development,
particularly in the environmental bit, as what you have to not
do, reducing this and not doing that. Instead we need to talk
about what it could mean. It could mean living in a home which
is 90% energy efficient and has much lower energy bills and is
also a stylish and practical place to live. So we need to link
the problem to some of the more positive solutions as well as
just preaching the doomsday scenario. Those things are real and
we cannot hide from them but those on their own will not achieve
change in society.
Q20 Mr Challen: Do you think part of
the problem is the consumerist message we get from all quarters
in Western society whereas people who live in what used to be
known as the Third World are already facing these problems more
so than we are. Perhaps if we could somehow take radical action
to address the consumerist issue, would that help? We hear it
in other areas. Obesity is now top of the agenda—it probably
will not be for much longer—so surely we should be pressing
the Government to challenge the consumerist nature of our society?
We could do that straightaway.
Mr Lee: I think that is absolutely
fundamental because we have said in our evidence—and we
would be happy to provide more material—if you actually
look at what is happening, the rate or the level of absolute consumption
that we rely on for our quality of life, we would say if everybody
lived on the earth as we do in the UK you would need three planets,
not one. That is the statistic we use. If you break that down,
you say where is that pressure from the consumption that we all
enjoy manifest? The other point is that over the last 50 years
that pressure has been globalised. It is a global economy and
it is a global environment, so a great deal of the pressure we
in the UK put on the planet's resources comes because we are part
of the global economy, we are importing goods and services, we
are exporting products, and we are also exporting pollution around
the world. We believe in WWF that you have to look at that broad
view first and you cannot address the issue simply by dealing
with what the technical people always call resource efficiency.
You cannot do it just by being more efficient. Yes, we need to
do all of that. We need technological solutions that would mean
we can do far more with the resources we have but it is also about
the absolute level of consumption. That is something that cannot
be hidden in the review of the sustainable development strategy.
The challenge obviously is to how you then go out and communicate
that with people in a way which is about doing something in a
smarter way rather than just a negative message about doing less
and sitting up a pole with a hessian sack on your head, which
is absolutely not the issue. It is about doing things in a smarter
way and achieving some of the quality of life issues without always
increasing the level of material consumption. At the moment we
think the Government's approach to say we have decoupled GDP growth
from impacts on the environment is a bit disingenuous because
in fact a lot of it has just been chucked over the garden wall
to China or Brazil or somewhere else, and we cannot fudge that
issue, we have got to face up to it and take global responsibility.
Q21 Sue Doughty: I would like to return
to the whole issue about what we mean by sustainability because,
as you heard, we were talking about sustainable housing and we
have got the Treasury objectives of sustainable growth. What is
your feeling about the coinage, the language of sustainability?
Does it mean anything?
Mr Lee: I think it does and for
all its downsides it is the best thing we have. To start again
now and try and find a new set of definitions or new terminology
would be disastrous because it is starting to be used in business,
it is being used in local government, it is being used in lots
of places in society. I agree with what Paul said that we need
to re-visit the definition and for us the definition has to be
about the quality of life on the one hand and the carrying capacity
of the planet on the other. Those are the absolutes we have to
achieve, with the economic processes, GDP growth and other things
in between connecting them. I think the language itself is the
least worst option, is the way I put it. We have got it, it does
convey something very broad and very complicated to a lot of people
and it is a big job to promote it, but I do not think we should
move away from it, I do not think we should now try and switch
to something else.
Q22 Sue Doughty: So you think the Government
is right to use sustainability in its use of terminology?
Mr Lee: No, I did not say that
and, exactly as Paul said earlier, the term is subject to a lot
of abuse and it needs to be policed to make sure that when we
talk about sustainability, which is better than sustainable development,
we are actually meaning something quite precise, and that is why
I would argue for these two definitions which bound it because
I think we are beginning to know a lot more about global limits,
the carrying capacity of the planet, and the impact of the resources
we use. We are only at the beginning of knowing a little bit more
about quality of life and what material consumption means in terms
of people's own experience of their life and where they are able
to find quality, and that is where we should be putting the effort—into
being much clearer about those two things within the term "sustainable
development".
Q23 Sue Doughty: Looking at that definition
about carrying capacity we have this concept within that about
ecological limits and with the debate on energy we have been looking
at atmospheric limits. Can you ever take account of things such
as biodiversity? If the earth supports humanity, would it continue
to do so even with that loss of biodiversity? How far would carrying
capacity include biodiversity in those other aspects of it?
Mr Lee: There are various ways
of looking at it obviously. The kind of approach that we have
taken globally is to say you have to take some kind of working
assumption. One working assumption, for example, is that 10% of
the earth's surface should remain as wild nature, as relatively
pristine ecosystems, but then there are all the services that
nature provides. That could be in terms of forests which effectively
manage and buffer watersheds in developing countries. It could
be in terms of river basins which are the basis of life for people
living there. It could be on the basis of marine resources like
fisheries. It could be on the basis of the role of forests in
mitigating climate change. We can look at the services, if you
like, that biodiversity provides but also the idea of a critical
limit below which you would not go. The analogy that we find useful
(because it communicates it) is to say we should be living off
nature's interest, not off the capital. You can argue about the
precise limits forever but the fact is if you were to ask the
question if we are living beyond our means what effects would
you see in the world, those are the effects that we are seeing.
We are beginning to see the extreme weather events. We have got
the collapsing fish stocks. We have got the critical loss of biodiversity.
If you look around you can see the red lights flashing in terms
of the damage we are doing to that natural system which provides
natural resources for our economy and also provides services on
which we very much rely.
Q24 Sue Doughty: Why do you prefer your
definition to the Government's definition of sustainability?
Mr Lee: From our point of view
it just gets across this issue of global limits very clearly and
I do not think that can be fudged. We have one planet, we have
to learn to live within one planet. It implies within it the equity
between generations and the equity between different parts of
the world. If we are to live within our means here in the UK when
we are living a three-planet lifestyle we have to find a different
way of meeting those needs if other people on earth are to achieve
minimal standards, a basic level of consumption and quality of
life. It is the global limits part that comes through very strongly
on that.
Q25 Sue Doughty: Going back to your calculations
you say we have been living beyond the carrying capacity of the
earth for about 20 years. What are the environmental impacts you
base this assumption on?
Mr Lee: They are very much the
things I was talking about before in terms of collapse of fish
stocks, in terms of critical loss of biodiversity around the world,
in terms of the impact on river basins and access to fresh water,
and in terms of global climate change and patters of weather events.
These are all indicators we would say at this stage that are pointing
towards having overshot these limits already. You can bring those
home in terms of our fish stocks here in the UK as one example.
Q26 Sue Doughty: Why 20 years rather
than 10 or 50 years in terms of your calculation. You say that
we have been living beyond the carrying capacity of the earth
for about 20 years.
Mr Lee: If you calculate the overall
levels of consumption globally which we did in our Living Planet
report—we accept that this is a broad measure and it is
based on lots of published sources from the UN and the World Resources
Institute and other people—and if you take those figures
it is about that point where the lines cross over: where the carrying
capacity of the planet starts to be exceeded by consumption levels.
Q27 Chairman: Which is partly a function
of the rapid economic development in various parts of the world
which were previously not consuming very much, particularly China.
Mr Lee: Absolutely.
Chairman: It is not only a matter for
the UK Government.
Q28 Mr Wright: I want to focus on that
point for a second. How do you measure the distance from sustainability
in using that model? Have you looked at what we need to do to
move us to 19, 18, 17 years away, et cetera? How do you do that?
Mr Lee: If you use the methodology
that we have used in WWF and if you take this concept of three
planets for example, that gives you an idea of the scale of the
challenge. What that is saying is at the moment we are living
a three-planet lifestyle here not a one-planet lifestyle. You
can translate that back into an ecological footprint. You can
do that statistically. To bring this theory down to very, very
practical issues some of the Committee may well be very familiar
with BedZED, this housing development in South London, and you
may have been there yourself. There is actually a body of evidence
now bringing this down to a very practical level saying what kind
of lifestyle does that development enable in terms of getting
a three-planet down to one-planet level of consumption. It is
very interesting what they have discovered because the development
itself—the infrastructure and all of the choices people
can make within that development—brings you down to the
two-planet level. To get down another level to a one-planet level
is about dealing with shared infrastructure because everybody
living there is using public services, public transport, the Health
Service, using food production and distribution systems, and all
sorts of other things. So what it is telling us is in a very practical
way in the UK you can do a certain amount, in this case through
the design of communities and the choices that citizens can make
but the other part relies very much on government policy, shared
infrastructure and shared services. So that brings it from a very
global level down to a very practical level.
Q29 Paul Flynn: Mr Lee, you criticise
in your paper the objectives of the strategy and suggest they
do not fit well together and you even say they could in fact be
mutually exclusive. Do you think there has been too much of a
focus on the win/win situation and not enough on managing trade-offs?
Mr Lee: I think if they are win/win
situations in terms of delivering improvements in quality of life
and environmental benefits then that is a good approach. If you
use some practical examples—and you were talking earlier
about the fuel tax debate—if you look at the way congestion
charging has been handled as an issue, if you look at the recent
discussion about the European Emissions Trading Scheme, what we
actually see is that the high and stable levels of economic growth
criteria, the GDP driver if you like, is taking precedence. I
do not think there is a trade-off because that implies that either
side may win. What we are actually seeing too often still is an
economic imperative which I think is about a short-term per capita
GDP growth that comes first in any calculation. When issues are
taken from government departments right up to prime ministerial
level that is the way the outcome tends to go. We have seen that
also with the Chemicals Regulation in Europe. The only time the
Prime Minister has intervened in this was to say this is anti-competitive,
it is a burden on business. You can have government departments
working very hard to deliver a strong regulation.
Q30 Paul Flynn: You made a point about
the Government's early opposition to the London congestion charge
and the failure to make the public case for fuel duty increases
and the recent decision to weaken the UK's final emissions trading
cap. Can I ask the same question that I asked the previous witness:
does your organisation disappear, are your mouths bandaged when
these issues come up or when it is unpopular to raise them against
the lunacy of the tabloids?
Mr Lee: I certainly hope not.
The fuel tax issue which you raised, and I thought might come
up today, is etched on my brain very, very personally. I drew
some conclusions from that. My conclusion was that as an NGO we—WWF—had
to be much closer in touch with our members about what you might
call these "difficult" environmental issues. It might
be climate change, it might be toxic chemicals. We are doing that
in the sense that we are now starting to campaign in a very up-front
way on those issues and to engage people, but that is at a very
small number at this stage. I think there is a long way we have
to go in practising what we preach and engaging our own members
and supporters in these difficult issues. I accept that entirely.
However, if you look at the fuel tax case, there was an absence
of any real advocacy by government for why fuel tax rises could
be justified in terms of climate change and reducing fuel use
and there was one-sided reporting from the media that decided
the story was about truck driving heroes going down the M1. There
has to be a shared responsibility here. So I do not place the
final responsibility on the NGOs at all. However, we do have to
communicate these things. In fact, WWF is looking closely at how
you do that, particularly without switching people off. If we
go to our members and say it is just about having less things
they are not likely to be very pleased, but if we can take the
message out in other ways we might engage people, and that is
what we have to do.
Q31 Paul Flynn: You are quite critical
of DFID and you cite a number of examples where it has failed
to mainstream sustainable development objectives. You say that
DFID appears to have forgotten about the very useful Target Strategy
Papers produced in conjunction with earlier White Papers. Can
you expand on that a little more and explain in what way they
were significant?
Mr Lee: Certainly. I should say
at the beginning that we know there are a group of people within
DFID, for example, who have worked very hard to put environment
into the Department, but our perception is that the bushfire has
not caught into a forest fire, it has not spread throughout the
department yet. It is manifest in the fact that the report DFID
commissioned itself in 2000 which actually looked at its environmental
performance, was very critical. There were then two White Papers
on globalisation with lots of good commitments on poverty and
environment and sustainable development, but meanwhile in DFID
the environmental role has been slightly downplayed in some of
these key areas like using these target papers, which were good
and set out objectives, or getting environment into the poverty
reduction strategy papers. I should say that these are key components
or conditions for aid flow into some of the highly indebted countries
around the world. Those papers are fundamental in terms of setting
conditions for how that aid is flowing and we have not seen a
strong enough voice in DFID in those, so we have a long way to
go.
Q32 Paul Flynn: You also suggest there
are not enough bodies in DFID. What evidence can you give for
that?
Mr Lee: There has been a downsizing
in the size of the environment team and its influence within the
department.
Q33 Paul Flynn: Doe you know what the
downsizing was?
Mr Lee: We can give you the figures.
I do not have them here but I am happy to provide them.
Q34 Paul Flynn: In relation to shifting
public opinion on sustainable development, Government campaigns
on raising awareness in this area have not enjoyed very great
success, as you know. How do you think we could make progress
here from the Government's point of view?
Mr Lee: I think it is an absolutely
crucial issue and I do not think simply doing more marketing and
things like "are you doing your bit?" is going to work.
I do not think Defra harbours any illusions about that either.
First of all, we have to get into which parts of society are shaping
people's values in this area. We have to get into the marketing
business and the advertising business and the media. We talk about
corporate social responsibility, for example, and we talk about
oil companies and other businesses. What about the media's social
responsibility in how these issues are reported? Also we are going
to have to find ways of learning what works on the ground, working
with people practically. We have tried to do this in schools in
the UK. I mentioned the homes example which is a favourite one
for WWF. Rather than just preaching a message we must actually
go out and test on the ground what works with people and find
out what we can learn from those things and take them back into
policy because I do not think public awareness campaigns achieve
behaviour change. I think there is a lot of social research out
there. ESRC and all sorts of other people know far more about
it than I do about what motivates people and what might create
change. If we are serious about sustainability we need to get
into that and understand it rather better.
Q35 Paul Flynn: We have had evidence
from the Chief Scientist who says we have not made great progress
in convincing the public that there is a catastrophe about to
happen. Unless there is a major disaster like the number of deaths
in the heat wave in France last year or the deaths in Britain
in 1953 because of smog, do you think there is any hope of changing
public attitudes without conducting policy changes that are really
radical and painful, increasing insurance premiums and taxes and
so on?
Mr Lee: To make this shift towards
sustainability all of these things will need to happen so it is
about regulation, it is about taxes and financial instruments,
it is about information, but it is also about consumer choice.
It is easy to paint too bleak a picture of this. If people are
given choice and choice was made easy, very often people will
make these choices themselves. If you ask someone to pay twice
as much for an environmentally or ethically traded product it
is difficult for them to do it. If you ask somebody to use sustainability
as a criteria for buying a home but there are no products available
on the market, they are not going to do it. In this sense the
congestion charging model is a good one because it has been tested
and a lot of the rhetoric surrounding it has changed because it
has been tested on the ground and it may be possible to roll out
projects like that. It has to be all of those things together.
There is talk about a state of denial, people just do not want
to know, and I think it is because the issue is presented as so
all-encompassing and so difficult to change that they feel disempowered.
They just think, "There is nothing I can do," whereas
in fact there are a lot of practical things. We did research called
Action at Home when we did a lot of work with households—a
few years ago now—and what we found is firstly people are
prepared to make changes themselves but overwhelmingly what they
were saying to us was that choice was not offered to them. Public
transport is not available to get out of the car. The waste recycling
facilities are not available from this local authority. These
things have to move together. I do not think it is an issue about
educating the public more or shouting louder.
Q36 Mr Wright: Just a couple of brief
questions on indicators, again returning to that point. You have
agreed that the current indicators do not fully reflect the degree
to which we live unsustainably at the moment. You have talked
about a number of possible alternatives. You have already mentioned
today the ecological footprint, the green GDP and social indicators.
What specific measures would you want to see used in this debate
and is there some kind of all-encompassing aggregate measure that
we could use that would be simple for the public to understand,
particularly in light of Mr Flynn's line of questioning which
is making it understandable for Joe and Josephine Public?
Mr Lee: I think we need a basket
of indicators and they have got to be aggregates. I know there
is a lot of controversy in government about putting more aggregate
indicators together. I find this very bizarre when we found most
of our macroeconomic policy on GDP which is an aggregate indicator.
GDP exists, it is well-known, it does a certain job well measuring
the flows in the economy. That is fine. I would put alongside
it a global measure of pressure on resources which is what the
ecological footprint is. That happens to be our favourite way
of doing that. I would put it alongside biodiversity and I would
put it alongside some kind of compound social indicator. I know
this approach has been tested in Wales by the Welsh Government
and, interestingly, I think the approach they have taken is to
say let us not sit here arguing forever about how precisely to
get every last detail of these indicators worked through, let
us get them out in the public domain and let us start saying to
people, "Oh, look, this is interesting; GDP per capital is
going up, footprints are going through the ceiling, skylarks are
going down the tube, the social index is going the wrong way.
What does this tell us? Does it feel to you, as somebody who is
watching the news, as if it actually chimes a chord?" I think
the problem we have at the moment is that there is growing evidence
in the UK that at the same time we say GDP is growing on a relentless
pathway which looks great, that does not necessarily chime with
people and how people experience their own environment and their
own quality of life. I would put a small number of these indicators
together and start promoting them as a group. I would call it
GDP Plus and put the other things alongside and say, yes, of course
GDP is important, it is a very important measure, but let us look
at these other things. This is telling us how much pressure we
are putting on the planet. This is telling us something about
quality of life. So put the other things alongside and start reporting
those. I think politically that works much better because having
150 indicators or even 15 headlines, I do not know about you,
but what does it mean? It is fine if you are a government department
wanting to measure one thing or one or two areas where you have
responsibility and maybe you have targets, that is fine, you need
it. If you are a business and you want to focus on certain aspects
of your business you will need those sorts of measures. But for
the public and in politics I do not think those work.
Q37 Mr Wright: The connection is for
people to say, "If I buy the best-rated refrigerator, if
I make that step, if I recycle in my household, if I use my composting
bin outside, what measure of contribution am I making, what difference
am I making?" because people see this as a massive issue
and they say it is very, very important and then they go away
and deal with their lives in exactly the same way as they are
currently dealing with them. So we need some kind of measure that
says if 100 people in a neighbourhood do this, this is the impact
it makes. If 1,000 people in a neighbourhood do this, this is
the impact it makes on that indicator. How do we do that?
Mr Lee: That is why we like the
footprint. Firstly it is graphic, you can describe it, you can
draw pictures of it, people get the concept very quickly. We have
tested that. They have never heard of it before you talk to them
but once you talk to them they get it very quickly. The second
thing is about the global limits, it gets that idea over, but
also, taking up your point, it talks about apples and pears. It
actually says there are lots of different things you do in your
life but collectively what do they add up to? You can set yourself
a challenge. Maybe you can get the footprint down a bit next year.
Maybe you turn that into a more positive way of doing that. It
will work for business. You can talk there about shareholder value
and the bottom line going up and footprint going down. So it does
allow you to compare different things using a standard methodology
which is transparent, and which we believe is robust, and which
is being set up as a set of international standards now as well,
so that is one way of doing that.
Chairman: A final question, I am afraid,
from Simon Thomas.
Q38 Mr Thomas: Is there not a huge contradiction
in what we have been discussing in the two sessions that you have
been present for in the idea that we can have consumer choice
actually helping us get out of the mess that consumerism has got
us into in the first place? With reference to BedZED you said
that so much depended on co-operation and coming together and
yet later on you said consumer choice can give the choice to the
consumer and they lead the way to sustainability. Let us be honest
that does not seem to be the way consumers choose, or vote for
that matter either. As a final add-on to that you talk a little
bit about a social indicator. If we did an indicator of GDP and
an indicator of the number of people on anti-depressants they
would go hand-in-hand, would they not? How can we get over to
people that the quality of life that you talk about in your definition
of sustainability, is not being addressed in the present way we
are running our consumerist society? How can we do that if we
can only use the tools of the consumerist society? That is the
bind we are in, is it not?
Mr Lee: Can I answer the other
way round because I will remember it that way. On the social one
I am not well-placed to talk about social indicators. What I understand
is there have been serious attempts to put together things like
an ISEW as a social indicator which links your depression point
to the GDP, so there are other organisations well-placed to do
that and we would like to work with them and put them alongside.
On the consumer point, yes, it is a paradox but it just seems
to me that we have worked on sustainable development education
for 15-20 years, for example, and we have had a fantastic experience
with individual schools and some evidence of mainstreaming of
that policy, but those children are in an environment which is
shaped by consumerist values and I think we have to start working
with the marketeers. I spoke recently with someone who is just
retiring from Unilever who is very animated about doing this.
If you look at how marketing as a profession has developed and
how sophisticated it is now in helping to create desires and shape
demand, if we apply some of that brainpower to these issues I
think we could go a long way.
Q39 Mr Thomas: Making sustainability
a consumer product?
Mr Lee: Part of it is about that.
Part of it is providing easy ways in which people can make a choice
which feels good, it is better for the planet but you do not need
to make a big issue about getting it because it is a good product
otherwise. There have been a lot of studies on this. The brand
has to be strong anyway, the product has to be strong. The fact
it has got environmental credentials is almost an add-on but people
go for it. If you look at what some businesses are starting to
do in terms of moving away from providing goods and towards providing
services, I think there are some market opportunities in this
to say to people, "Actually you want mobility, actually you
want cleanliness, actually you want these different things, and
that is what you want in your life. We can give you that without
so much stuff. It is a huge challenge." I am not under-estimating
it at all but I do think again with this strategy review we have
got to get into advertising and marketing because these things
drive so much of how people value things.
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