Rich opportunity in a planet with limits
Apparently, Christopher Columbus did not think the world was flat. The story that his crew feared they would sail off the edge of the earth was made up in 1828, when it had become popular to make fun of pre-modern times, and we have chuckled along ever since.
It makes me wonder how future generations will look upon us. Because even though we know better, most of us were raised to believe (and generally still do) that the world has no bounds.
When I was born, it was only a decade since climbers conquered Everest. Plane travel was available but transatlantic travel was mostly by ship, taking days. The Newfoundland cod stocks were still wildly abundant. The forests were endless. There was no GPS, no cel phone. Parts of the globe were uncharted.
It was a world without limits, and we were taught to embrace it as an exhilarating personal challenge – to do better, to go farther, to collect the riches that boundless opportunity could provide.
That idea is where we face a necessary turning point. We still have opportunities. But we do not live on a limitless planet (and of course, we never did). The trouble is that those of us who were inculcated with the notion of a world with phenomenal dimensions and limitless resources are now in charge – and we’re struggling with changing our mindset.
I recently had a conversation with a person I admire, who has spent his life working to advance international trade. I suggested a simple sustainability strategy: that all international policy, all trade frameworks, all business plans, all management schemes (government or corporate), should be based on a basic, shared recognition: we live in a finite ecosystem. From that starting point, we can build policy and plans that appropriately recognize that an externality here is a problem over there, that over-harvesting here causes shortages there. We can see the world accurately, and possibly save our skin.
This sounds simple, but it’s not, because it is not the way we were raised to think. Getting to this collective “starting point” is a transformative journey. As an example, consider Coca-Cola and water.
In 2004, Coke came under fire in southern India, where farmers were struggling with drought while the company continued to bottle beverages without trouble. This led the company to sharpen its focus on water as a critical input to its business process; to think strategically – both in terms of natural resource and public reputation – about how it stewards water in the hundreds of places it bottles beverages around the world.
Of course, it stepped up its efforts on efficiency – use less, waste less. Reduce the water required to make the product, wash the plant, and operate sinks, toilets, and lawn sprinklers. The goal was to reduce the 3-plus litres of water required to make one litre of Coke to just 2.5 or so. (Details from Peter Senge’s recent book, The Necessary Revolution – a great read.)
But this was not yet finite-planet thinking. Coke’s big leap forward came when it started to consider the impact of water on its entire value chain – and got a shock. You can’t make Coke without sugar – and you can’t grow sugarcane without water. The total “water footprint” of the ingredients for one litre of Coke – considered from a total-value-chain point of view – is roughly 200 litres of water.
This calculation vastly increased Coca-Cola’s awareness of its sensitivity to water availability – and the business imperative it faces in terms of being a good steward of global water resources. Since water shortages are already widespread, and projections estimate half the world’s population will be “severely water stressed” in 16 years, this shifted the company’s focus beyond its plant walls to the watersheds and global water systems it relies on. As a senior Coca-Cola environment staff comments, “It really doesn’t matter how efficient you are [inside a plant] if there’s no water.”
In 2007, Coca Cola’s CEO announced the company’s goal “to return to communities and nature an amount of water equivalent to what we use in all our beverages and their production.” The company’s water stewardship webpage says, “The world has a finite amount of water… We hope to establish a water-sustainable business on a global scale.”
Coca-Cola is making the mental shift I described earlier. It is considering its business in the context of a limited planet, a resource base with hard boundaries and perpetual recycling of the same set of materials. It uses the word “finite” to describe its key input. It does not appear to believe that recognizing these parameters will limit its potential. Indeed, it has stared in the face the fact that denying these parameters could lead to its demise.
We were brought up with the spirit that our personal potential was somehow informed and shaped – and given real material wealth – by the limitless world around us. (Car advertisers still pump the nostalgia by evoking beautiful spaces and endless roads.) No wonder it’s painful to feel the crashing brakes of finite ecosystem reality. We have to redefine more than just our business processes – we have to prove to ourselves that we can be bold adventurers, nimble entrepreneurs, and savvy innovators even as we hunker down to the task of making every drop of water count.
This is our real challenge today, the corner of history we need to turn (if not for survival, then to avoid being judged bumbling fools in the resource-constrained future). Luckily, the resources we need for the challenge – human creativity and ingenuity – are not finite at all.
Nina Winham (nina@newclimate.ca) is principal of New Climate Strategies, helping clients build value through sustainability. She writes regularly on sustainability topics. www.newclimate.ca
