simon zadek

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”.