The Best Sustainability Conference You Didn't Attend

Welcome to our third 2024 edition of RADAR – our monthly email.

An 8-minute read from a design viewpoint to expand your perspective and deepen your knowledge, helping you better navigate the shifting world of brands and consumers.?

This month, we are sharing a snapshot of The Economist Sustainability Conference, written by our Managing Director Nick Dormon.

The Economist Sustainability Week conference, run in both London and New York, is attended by over 1200 stakeholders within sustainability and the economy and has around 300 speakers from myriad industries.?

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My return visit to the conference in London this spring showed some marked differences from last year, highlighting the fast pace of sustainable development. There was more emphasis on the importance of data – particularly in food and materials supply chains – plus biodiversity moved from being on the periphery to taking centre stage. Players and experts in technology, legislation, finance, data analysis, agriculture, aeronautics and more attended, with a few notable exceptions.??

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No one evident from consumer goods companies like Unilever, Danone and Nestlé were present. I don’t think this is necessarily because of a lack of interest but rather a lack of time. The pace of change has to accelerate and efforts tripled, but resources are limited, especially when sustainability is seen as a problem to fix rather than an opportunity to embrace. Therefore sustainability is a cost rather than an investment. That has to change.

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It is impossible to cover everything in such a rich and diverse gathering, so here is a snapshot, from a designer’s perspective, of some of the highlights from these two days. If you’d like to know more, let me know, but please do try to attend next year to see the bigger picture. It’s well worth it from the knowledge you will gain, the people you will meet and the energy and optimism you will feel.?

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The opening address by Andrea Illy (of coffee fame) and the Regenerative Society Foundation captured the overriding theme of the event: systemic change. There is no plug-and-play solution; in circular solutions, every intervention affects another, which affects another. People of faith believe the complexities of nature could not work without divine intervention, but it is an absolute certainty that a harmonious relationship with our planet cannot be achieved unless it is designed to the greatest degree by ourselves.??

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The Complexities Of Power

As renewable energy generation from solar, wind and other sources matures and capacity accelerates, it brings into stark contrast the gaps where electricity cannot fulfil our power needs. Heavy industry and aviation, for example, need alternative solutions and, despite a ban on petrol and diesel car production in 2035, we will still have 100 million cars in the EU that will need chemistry, not electricity, to run for many years to come. We will still need both molecules and electrons to fuel our world. Hydrogen seems to be the favoured ‘molecule’ with its rainbow grading from dirty to clean production, highlighting that the least bad solutions will remain in the mix for the foreseeable future. However, this balance of power source must not be biased by the most powerful. The activist, Clover Hogan, pointed out that the petrochemical industry lobbies are numerous, well-funded and highly active. She raised the need for far stronger lobbying from a sustainability perspective. This counter-lobbying cannot come from activists alone and should come from the giant corporations now investing heavily in green technology to meet their CSR net-zero targets. COP28 was in Dubai and COP29 is in Baku; perhaps it would be better to host it in Chad – a country ranked as the world’s most climate-vulnerable by the Global Adaptation Index to sharpen the minds of those attending.?

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An Agricultural Redesign

I was interested to learn from Andy Cato of Groove Armada, now a regenerative farmer, that post-war, our agricultural soils were universally nutrient-deficient, hence the rapid adaptation of bomb-making chemistry to fertiliser production was essential to feed the burgeoning population. In reality, you have to go a long way back to find the bucolic world of rich farmland that we imagined we had so recently lost – we had been stripping it for some time before industrial farming came along. So, the argument that chemicals are bad is again just too one-sided. They did a vital job, but they went too far. The solution can’t be to just let nature get on with the job. It needs help, so chemical companies in the conference mix were not as worrying as it might at first seem. We need fertiliser, but we need just the right amount of the right chemical in the right place – a new term learned from BASF was precision agriculture. Technology across the spectrum is vital to the cause. Drones and satellites are mapping the land, probes are measuring the soil and robots are tending the crops.??

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Global System Intervention

Whilst the politicians are talking up isolationism, the story inside the conference was the opposite. The world’s economic map was drawn up in previous industrial revolutions but that will change. Britain and Germany benefited from large deposits of iron ore and coal in the last industrial revolution, and the Middle East in oil production, but if our energy comes from sun and wind, regions like sub-Saharan Africa look well-placed to flourish. Mauritania, brought to our screens recently on Amazon’s Grand Tour, has large deposits of iron ore and limitless sun and wind to produce the hydrogen required to smelt it. This, combined with exciting projects like the UN’s Green Wall Initiative to push agriculture back against the encroaching desert, will ensure stability and encourage their growing populations to stay home. Investment in new green fuel regions might stem the migration flow and help these nations contribute to a global market in a significant way.??

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Fuelling Natural Systems

I was delighted to see biodiversity at the top of the agenda. I was shocked to learn last year that only 2% of our land biomass is wild, whilst 35% is cattle. We need cows, just not that many, and we need dramatic action to increase our biodiversity. The solutions are not as simple as eating plants exclusively or, as the Welsh farmers are fighting against, turning 10% of their land back to the wild to get their subsidies. Every landscape has to be redesigned carefully, taking into account every stakeholder. For that, farmers and landowners need encouragement, knowledge, funding and the belief that what they are doing is for the better – especially for them.??

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A Lack of Communication Design

Greenwashing seems to have morphed into green-hushing. Communication to the public is retracting rather than expanding for fear of criticism. Articulating the benefits of sustainability has not been a success and schemes like ULEZ are seen to unfairly impact lower-income families and become politically toxic. In the UK, when the chancellor reduced National Insurance, a Tony Blair Institute poll showed that people preferred that the money be spent on health services, our police and schools than give it back. Yet, they would rather take the money than spend it on initiatives to reach net zero.?

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For investors to gauge risk, the need to parallel financials with ESG reporting (or its undefined offspring as ESG seems to have failed to hit the mark) is reliant on facts and figures. But as any good brand manager will tell you, consumers are led by their hearts, not their heads. Statements like “98% recyclable recycled plastic” are confusing and will never ignite their imagination. We need exciting, inspiring stories of achievement and hope and there were many to be found at the conference. We just need to make this more consumer-facing.?

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Planning Our Forests

The end of the conference closed with an inspiring film, Beyond the Trees, by Imaginary Forces for VanEck and The Pacific Forest Trust.? We learned that 60% of the forest in America is privately owned and so needs to generate income. Yet it is a vital part of the ecosystem. Remarkably, in the North West, most forests have been felled at least once. What we think of as 100% natural is often not the case. The Trust addresses the balance of restoring our forests whilst generating an income. Rather than felling plantations of young trees for early profit that strips the soil and wildlife, they sell carbon credits related to the carbon content of the forests. Because older trees carry more carbon, they can let them mature for longer, giving investors a regular income and a larger payout from old growth further down the line. Mature trees are felled selectively to maintain the forest ecosphere, which the team work hard to reinstate - from encouraging wildlife to seeding canopy moss; a carefully designed system that provides a win-win.?

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This demonstration that it is possible to invest in both nature and business and reap the rewards of well-being and profit is what we need to hear more about. Nature is intrinsically inspiring to us. We are part of it so we respond to it positively. Perhaps thinking in terms of natural systems rather than circular systems makes us a part of nature not separate from it. Yes, we need systemic change, but perhaps it is more about system alignment; working with nature rather than separate to, or against, it. Changing the narrative could be the key to bringing the billions of people outside the conference up to the same levels of excitement as those few hundred within.??