simon zadek

The Guardian invited me along with a few other folks to scribble some predictions for 2012. It must been a bad day when I finally hit the keys, but here is what I wrote.

2012 is going to be an unreasonably difficult year. We must be equally unreasonable in our ambitions for advancing sustainability.

The ‘sustainable biz’ circle’s golden rule is to keep one’s chin up, point out the good news, and duck the hard questions by appealing to an unknowable future. Being a party-pooper is considered impolite behavior, except perhaps through the majesty of John Elkington’s very-English metaphors. My personal prospects might be well served by joining Messrs Porter and Kramer in speaking of ‘shared values’. Better to be like Emma Howard Boyd, stretching optimism to breaking point in being positive about a financial sector whose bankers have personally pocketed US$2 trillion in the last five years and whose shenanigans cost the OECD an astonishing 26% of its collective GDP.

Frankly, penning positive ‘sustainability’ predications for 2012 on the same day that IMF chief, Lagarde, warns of a 1930’s style meltdown in the global economy is a challenge. The implications of China’s imploding property boom does not improve my state of mind. That The City instructed Cameron to either secure their interests in Europe or turn out the lights provides an expected, but ugly, backdrop. And all that in the context of the inexorable fall in the share of US working citizens in their own GDP, down to an historic 58%, which bodes badly for our cherished, North Atlantic ways.

Unfounded optimism, offered up to calm our rattled nerves with soothing lullabies, is a luxury we cannot afford. Time will tell whether 2012 will be a disaster of Largardian proportions, lets hope not. But as predictions go, one can’t go far wrong in saying that 2012 is going to be ghastly for, quite literally, hundreds of millions of people. Allowing oneself the discomfort of being troubled by current affairs might not be a bad thing. As Ed Mayo, my one-time boss at the New Economics Foundation, often gently reminded me that it is helpful to be at least a little angry when one gets up in the morning.

Noah’s biblical story spells out the fate of unreasonable folks, as I wrote in a recent China Entrepreneurs Club article, “Noah attempted repeatedly to warn his neighbors of the coming deluge, but was ignored or mocked”. Ray Andersson championed environmental sustainability despite being ridiculed for many years by his peers, employees and partners. Similarly for Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, John Browne of BP and many others who have stuck their necks out to say and do the right thing.

Being ridiculed for doing the right thing is an art that I have been working on over the last year in contributing to unreasonable initiatives. The South African Renewables Initiative was launched in Durban as an international financing partnership to accelerate the roll out of renewables in South Africa. The China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development has recommended to the State Council that China greens its expected trillion-dollar flow of outward investment over the next five years. The Korean-based, Global Green Growth Institute is working with governments around the world in advancing national and regional green growth plans, and the Canadian-based Centre for International Governance Innovation has provided an incubation hub for debating policy innovations that if implemented would better align financial market reform to sustainability outcomes. And we all hope that the UN High Level Panel on Global Sustainability, due to report out early in the new year, will raise our spirits and ambitions in the run up to Rio+20.

These initiatives are reasonably unreasonable, but we can and must do better. The Occupy movement has set the disruptive pace in calling for change, and it is our task to help deliver it. For 2012, I hereby open the Unreasonable List with three unreasonable ambitions. Firstly, Rio+20 could be a moment for some of the world’s largest businesses, working with others, to initiate their own ‘sustainability marshal plan’ by establishing collective stretch targets, their own post-Millennium Development Goals to deliver the benefits many nations are failing to achieve. Secondly, although we do seem to be able to land a decent, international carbon price, we could commit at Davos and then at the G20 in Mexico to ridding the world of the US$1 trillion worth of tax-financed, fossil fuel subsidies that in effect places a negative price on carbon today. And, thirdly, it is time to confront the financial sector, if not now when. We can during 2012 agree to establish, at least in Europe, a financial transactions tax as the vanguard of a root-and-branch realignment of the financial markets to delivering sustainability outcomes.

Predictions for next year, left to their own devices, look pretty bleak. So my wish list of one is that we declare 2012 the Year of the Unreasonable, establish an Unreasonable List and set ourselves some ridiculously ambitious goals.

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