simon zadek

Copenhagen was a structured, sovereign-state based negotiation with clear rules of engagement (albeit abused). It had a beginning, middle and (at least in theory) an end. It was designed to reach agreement on a specific set of activities entirely focused on the public good. It was also a veritable ‘walk through babylon’ (as my video clip painfully illustrated), and as we now all know deteriorated into a shambolic, ego-laden, mecantilist dog-fight.

Davos is designed as the elite market place for anything the globe has to offer. Intellectuals, activists and would be politicians ply their trade as casually as the attending traders normally do so glued to their phones, computer screens and wallet books. It is ordered along the lines of chaos, legitimacy is a matter of power, money, influence or stardom through the arts. There is no one deal to be done, no obvious rules of the game (there are some less obvious ones, to be sure), and governments compete for airtime with the latest bestselling writer, and the rowdiest Texas oilman.

Davos is a spectacle to behold, always threatening to reflect our worst Darwinian inclinations. Copenhagen, on the other hand, was meant to reflect humans at their best, open to collaboration for the public good. And yes, you have guessed it (you smart, cosmopolitan blog readers), life has its way of inverting the expected. Copenhagen actually demonstrated humans’ capacity to be petty, narrow-minded, and deeply tribal. far from being focused on the public good, it was focused on the private gain of vested interests largely not in the room, whether they were businesses, parochial politicians or even short-sighted populations of citizens who should have known better.

And Davos…well it is what it says on the tin, in one moment abstracted from any sense of reality, at another exhibiting the human ego at its most profoundly revolting. Yet it somehow unlocks the participants’ passion, innovation and a will to imagine and take risks. In muddling up the public good with private gain, it evokes much of what is amazing about our species and without doubt explains how we have survived to date (for better and worse). It is in Davos that investors in green technology have the stage,

yes aching for public subsidy if they can get it, but in truth knowing that they will fund the low carbon economy if it is going to happen. It is in Davos that the Chinese business community schmoozes with Western Governments and vice versa. It is on these snowy hills that more irreverent potential is discussed than could be dreamed of in any formal multilateral procedure.

Yes, a Managing Director of the World Bank was right when she reminded us at Davos that the farmers we were discussing were not in the room. And who knows what complex political equation Strauss Kahn from the IMF was making when he supported Soros’s proposal to unlock capital to fund climate management. And it is slightly crazy making when Sarkozy proposes to rewrite the rules of capitalism (better than his Italian counterpart though), and it makes you wonder when Davos declared itself ‘green‘ on the back of a half-hearted labelling of carbon-spewing, attending SUVs. But frankly such weaknesses are chicken-feed when compared to the cynical nonsense that stalked the corridors of the Bella Center in Copenhagen just weeks before.

You may well despair, and I might join you for an accompanying drink when you do, but Davos is more about our future than Copenhagen will ever be in bringing more of the right people to the table, and providing more opportunities for the deal making that is needed to safeguard our children and theirs in turn. We can bemoan the elitism, the false dawns too often announced and then neglected forever more, and the fly-in humbug of much that is said and neither meant nor even heard. But through this there is an authenticity in the demonstration of real power, truly extraordinary wealth, unbelievable innovators (for whatever reason and end), and a will to grasp the world as it is and shape it into the future. The tens of thousands leaving Copenhagen were angry, burnt out, and deeply exhausted. Those leaving Davos will be tired, often confused, but in the main better informed, connected and able and willing to act.

Have I drunk the Davos Kool Aid for too long to have any remaining sense? Well maybe, self-diagnosis is not humankind’s speciality, far from it, and I am no exception to the rule. Certainly Davos exhibits in technicolor more than it resolves what I called in an earlier blog this week sustainability’s very own Valley of Death, in a nutshell our ’struggle to innovate at scale in a timely way in addressing the world’s toughest problems‘. But its more likely that the solutions lie lurking beneath the canapes at Davos than the decrepit cheese sandwiches of Copenhagen if only because the folks in the former are actually treated with respect, treat each other in the main with respect, and have a will to live rather than just survive.

“We have an Accord that has some of the elements of a legally binding agreement that we need”, opined Achim Steiner from UNEP, “do not under-estimate what we have achieved. And on the trade regime, another year gone and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars investment and income generating on hold and at risk”.

Saturday afternoon, exhaustion showing on peoples’ faces, but an almost full room of folks ponder on the topic of trade and climate. “”it is about competition”, says Egyptian Trade Minister Rachid Mohamed Rachid, “will a climate deal lead us to be penanalised in an approach that we are not fully engaged in, that is, protectionism”. Pascal Lamy, doyen DG at the WTO, reflects with typical cautious flair, “I am mostly concerned with open trade, but i have a duty to care about the environment, i have an order of priorities, which we need to respect…Copenhagen is a step forward”  …”there is the potential of a multilateral framework that may work”, he adds making an art out of optimistic conditional statements, or perhaps conditional optimism. Madame Leuthard, Swiss President, “climate arrangements could be trade distorting…we have considered but failed to define ‘environmentally friendly products’, so we cannot factor this into trade arrangements, and does this discriminate against nations that cannot afford clean technologies, as claimed by the Indians and others”.

“A large part of this planet is underdeveloped”, argues Anil Sharma, “lets not kid ourselves, the discourse needs to be very honest, you cannot separate us from history, the situation has been brought about my unsustainable production and consumption. this is not a blame game, its just true. The entire agreement on carbon credits is unethical, ‘i have enough to pay you for my past sins rather than solving them’, Copenhagen has come out with a disappointing soft landing…so what shall we do where people die of hunger, what shall we tell them, your wealth was based on our resources, resources and technology have to be made available to poorer countries free…nations like India are in a position to be partners, but we have to be agreed on the goal that the poor nations will be supported freely…we can talk and talk, but will we address it honestly…on trade, we are committed to a fair regime that honestly corrects historical distortions, that is why Doha must come to a correct conclusion”.

“Trade might contribute to climate, it is not always damaging because of transport”, intervenes Lamy offering a technocratic anecdote to the preceding comments…”the Montreal Protocol on CFCs shows how it can be done, it did not create problems with trade…we have to try to reach the same point with climate”.

Polite, informed, and profoundly disfunctional.

Leuthard: “overcoming subsidies must be part of the solution, even although it would be hard, just as we have to consider ways to benefit environmentally friendly goods”.

Rachid: “to use trade to manage climate we need to resolve existing distortions first, which is what lies at the heart of the current negotiations…we have to accept the need for rational carbon border adjustments, to agree on environmental goods and services, and we have to agree on the issue of transport”.

Sharma: “the fundamental issue is about people, are those made poor in the past going to be held in poverty for ever…when you have one billion people denied food security, what do we say about biofuels…do we want to feed SUVs or people”.

Lamy: “We have an agreement that allows for protection of the environment, this is not protectionism…when is protection protectionism, that is what we have a mechanism for resolving such things”.

Steiner: “30 years from now there will be two powerful ministries in each government, one will be about financial capital, and the other dealing with natural capital…we are in a race against time and not progressing because of history…in change people get hurt and we need to deal with this…the current technology diffusion model is not credible, we have to focus on the economy, the low carbon economy…our debate is too abstract, too protective”.

Lamy: “can we join the two negotiations…there is no real trade off between these issues, more within these issues…there is a legal bridge, so we can connect already…that they are stuck is about domestic vested interests in both cases…so my simple answer is no”.

Many folks will know the ‘valley of death’ as a stage in the investment cycle of new clusters of investment opportunities where great and potentially profitable ventures cannot progress for lack of the scaled and correctly calibrated risk capital.

Davos this week has exposed a second and far more worrying valley of death. Sessions on water scarcity, deforestation, climate and any number of profoundly relevant topics reveal an underlying cycle. Initially comes the radical concern from civil society, then a more coherent call to arms, then a gradual moblisation of major actors, and then some serious analysis and reflective analytics….THEN…we all say ‘something must be done AND it can be’…it can be surely because everyone is at table, from national presidents to chief executives to the leaders of major corporate NGOs…and then…yes, and then there is this moment when folks say ‘here is an example, lets to some pilots, cases and briefings’, or they wring their hands and say ‘we do need better laws and for them to be enforced’.

In one session on ‘water’, we faced a superb set of analytics provided by McKinsey with its global cost curve for water, then drilled down to country level for several nations. Round the table sit many CEOs of some of the world’s most well-known consumer brands together with their corporate counterparts in the NGO community. And what was the action suggested: cases, pilots, guidelines, and a rather abstract notion that there was a need for better rules, regulations and pricing. Let me be clear, these are seriously smart, committed folks, they have power, money and influence, and in the main the right values and a desire to opertionalise them…but…

This is the new valley of death, everyone agrees with the analysis, the urgency and the possibility, and some of the most powerful folks are at the table…and then we implode into marginal actions or fall back on old tools to create systemic change.

What is the missing piece of this unseemly puzzle, we have knowledge, goals, inspiration and the powerful. Is it the youth that are absent, or perhaps the threat of revolution…is it a mind set problem “we have to think about a different way of doing business” says a leading business man… “and short termism is the enemy of the good”, says another. “We know how to create closed loop systems”, says an eco-business warrior, “efficiency saves money, but one can do the wrong thing efficiently”, rehearses a world leading designer.

Of course stuff does get done, loads of it, and sometimes there is a seriously ambitious punt to solve a major problem. Soros’ pitch to use a store of capital, US$100 billion, sitting at the IMF called ‘Special Drawing Rights’ to finance action on climate took an expected step forward today when  the IMF’s boss more or less endorsed the approach publicly in a plenary. Climate geeks were elated, although Obama’s economics guru, Lawrence Summers, could not hide his displeasure at this unexpected twist.Watch this important space to see how this develops in the weeks and months ahead.

And that old topic of corporate accountability. Well, after much arm-twisting, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced on day two of Davos that listed companies will in future have to disclose climate-related risks. This decision, hailed by activist groups such as CERES, could prove a game changer in levelling up the playing field in forcing companies to work out these risks in order to be able to report on them, and for unwilling investors to ‘read up on the topic’ so that they can understand the topic that so many of them are amazingly still trying to avoid.

So stuff does get done, and some of it has the potential to be game changing. In the two examples, both were considered ‘wacko’ when first tabled, the Soros proposition having been roundly dismissed by the mainstream when he talked about it at Copenhagen, and climate-related disclosure having been long resisted as irrelevant, impractical, or downright inappropriate.

Sustainability’s very own ‘valley of death’ remains, however, the norm, as the deputy prime minister of Zimbabwe said in a session i moderated today on land use and the environment, “we do seem to often to be paralysed by analysis”, alongside Ian Davis of McKinsey’s comment (they were sitting side by side) that “we are in danger of reducing our ambition by resort to projects of little scale for the sake of action”.

Muhtar Kent leads a breakfast discussion about the global challenge of water, leveraging a report launched entitled Charting Our Water Future prepared by McKinsey with numerous other folks. “The global needs of Coca Cola is the equivalent of 8 months use across Mexico City”, we are told alongside Coke’s commitment to become a ‘zero water take’ company.

“We cannot stay as we are, we need to look for another approach…there is a way to deal with the growing gap…today withdrawals are growing at 2% a year, there is a gap of 40% by 2030 between demand (7000 billion cubic meters) and supply…productivity improvements will only deal with 20% of the overall gap, and there is a further 20% of the gap that can be closed by increasing supply in historic ways…that leaves a 60% gap where ‘something different’ needs to be done to address.”

McKinsey has applied the ‘cost curve’ methodology to water and brought crystallized data to the discussion at a high level (see Project Catalyst for how this method has been applied to carbon mitigation).

“Looking at India, the analysis suggests that the water gap ‘can be solved’, that the vast majority of the solutions lie in water productivity improvements in agriculture, and that the net costs are about US$6 billion per annum, ‘not a huge cost for a country like India’…”.

“South Africa is facing a gap by 2030 of 3 cubic kilometers (without taking climate change into account, with this factored in, goes up at least a third)…there are many things that can be done…the ‘new way’ is to take the least cost solution and it can be dealt with, at a cost of US$300 million a year, but the ‘new cost’ given that saving arise would offset all these costs at a national, aggregate level…many countries face a crossroads, this least cost solution approach is how we all need to go if it is to be affordable”.

“Water is a social not an economic good”, explains a South African Minister, “we do understand that water is finite, but we have to take account of the socialist nature of our society…we have to develop an approach sensitively”… “there have to be other ways to incentivise better use of water, not just economic pricing”, argues an Indian chief executive… “pricing comes second, first is knowledge, we know how to do far better before pricing becomes the problem…we need a campaign to achieve best practice”, asserts a German water expert… “we have seen successes, also in the poorest communities in South Africa, “where we can get people to value water without charging them…this message has to be understood at the national level”…. “we do need to price water in agriculture, but we cannot leave this to market forces, water is key for food security, addressing poverty and other policy goals”, says a gentleman from the national federation of agricultural producers.

So if reinventing global governance is the game plan, who are the key players.

Are they the gathered assembly at Davos, the obvious cast of characters, or are there folks lurking on the fringes of the elite who might compete for a place at the table, or even redesigning the table or owning all or a piece of it.

The most recent entrant is BASIC = BRICS – Russia (or maybe ’self-definition without Goldman Sachs’). China-led or at least conceived of, it was of course these folks on whose door Mr Obama knocked on the search for Wen Jiabao. So in the popular game of geopolitical tag, 1:0 to BASIC if the opponent was the US-led G8.

BASIC met just last weekend, thoughtfully before Davos and a week or so in advance of the ‘not so hard and fast’ closing date for countries to register their commitments under the Copenhagen Accord. Reporting in The Hindu, China and India announced their decision not to sign up to the Accord for now. Indian Prime Minister Singh highlighted BASIC’s commitment to the UNFCCC and Kyoto and queried the legitimacy of the Accord beyond a high level political statement emerging from a battle worn Copenhagen.

Early days, and so far BASIC is focused on climate and largely reinforcing an understandably furious but wildly out-of-time G77 position. But could BASIC become a more widely transacted governance currency in times to come.  BASIC might be a refreshing antidote to the G8, but it could in the end be little more than an anti-G8. Such zero-sum politics would not serve us well, least of all the citizens of BASIC nations, since being defined by opposition is little more than being ’shadow like’. Could BASIC raise its game and conceive of a different politics that grapples with global problems rather than relocating the drivers of disfunction.
Curious will be to see to what extent BASIC becomes a reference point in the coming discussions at Davos in the coming days.