Conclusions of the Stern Review
That kind of mismatch on climate change has to be the most mystifying deficit of all. It was, after all, the Treasury itself that commissioned Sir Nicholas Stern to write his magisterial Review, ‘The Economics of Climate Change’. In launching the Review, both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair appeared to entirely endorse one of Stern’s principal conclusions that: “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen”, and, further, that: “Adaptation to climate change – that is, taking steps to build resilience and minimise costs – is essential.” He continued, “It is no longer possible to prevent the climate change that will take place over the next two to three decades, but it is still possible to protect our societies and economies from its impacts to some extent – for example, by providing better information, improved planning and more climate-resilient crops and infrastructure.
“But the world does not need to choose between averting climate change and promoting growth and development. Changes in energy technologies and in the structure of economies have created opportunities to decouple growth from greenhouse gas emissions.”
Writing this article in the soggy aftermath of the July floods in Gloucestershire, I can’t help but compare the Treasury’s subsequent efforts to consign the Stern Review to the filing cabinet marked NIMTO (Not in my Term of Office) with the leadership provided by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, in first producing and then driving forward what is probably the world’s most ambitious Climate Change Action Plan. The mayor’s efforts in this area have been strongly endorsed by the C40 initiative, through which the Clinton Climate Initiative has brought together the mayors of 40 of the world’s most dynamic cities to share best practice in driving carbon out of their urban economies without damaging their citizens’ prosperity.
Public sector innovation
What’s more, there’s no shortage of commitment and innovation elsewhere within the UK’s public sector to start getting serious about climate change. The reputation of Woking, for instance, has been transformed from sleepy, Home Counties gentility to global pioneer; the so-called ‘Merton Rule’ (requiring 10% of any new commercial property to source 10% of its energy from renewables) has now been taken up by more than 100 local authorities elsewhere in the country; the Nottingham Declaration is being adopted by more and more local authorities as the benchmark against which they should now be measuring themselves. Many Regional Development Agencies are fired up about the challenge of driving forward the transition to a low-carbon economy (my own RDA in the south west has adopted as its goal the idea of “securing economic growth within environmental limits to bring prosperity to the region”), but are constantly baffled by the endless flow of mixed messages and conventionally growthist ‘tasking frameworks’ from central government.
I see this at close hand through Forum for the Future’s direct engagement with many of the real leaders in the public sector today. For instance, our partnership with the Welsh Assembly Government, with its statutory duty to integrate sustainable development into all of its work, led to the development of a formal Integration Tool (approved by the Cabinet and by the Assembly’s own Management Board) to test all the Assembly’s policies against a set of strategic development priorities.
Through the Welsh Local Government Association, the 22 local authorities in Wales are being urged to adopt the Welsh Sustainability Standard (co-created with the Forum) as a powerful means both of benchmarking and improving performance – with authorities like Powys, Carmarthenshire and Caerphilly making real progress.
This stuff isn’t easy. It takes serious application, based on the incredibly simple insight that the net value public services can generate on behalf of the people they serve can be significantly enhanced by working within an integrated sustainable development framework. The ‘public value’ case for sustainable development is therefore a simple one: sustainable development provides a clear and accessible framework for defining the common good, and the performance standards to be met by public services. It is entirely consistent with the emphasis on partnerships between public bodies and other stakeholders in the search for joined up solutions and shared value. It seeks to design problems out upstream rather than having to cope with them later downstream. That means putting the emphasis on preventive policy making, ensuring that policies are geared as much to avoiding negative, knock-on consequences as to achieving a specific goal or outcome.
