Procurement with Purpose Newsletter no. 76 – July 23rd, 2024

I was up north last week to commemorate my Mum’s passing three years ago. I stayed at the fascinating Ushaw College, previously a Catholic seminary and boarding school and a quite incredible collection of listed buildings west of Durham City. But whilst some are still amazing – the Chapel is up there with Kings College or St Georges at Windsor Castle for general amazingness – some huge ?buildings are now partly derelict (like the Victorian farm buildings) or fire damaged in 2023 (St Aloysius Chapel).? The buildings now have various occupants including the County Council, a school and some small businesses, and includes a handful of bedrooms.

Of course, I now look at this in terms of carbon. It is not just what would make economic sense but also what the future use of the buildings (or indeed their demolition) might mean in terms of emissions. There is a personal interest too. My Grandfather worked at Ushaw in the 1930s. He was the Herdsman, in charge of their herd of prized cows, which provided milk and beef for the College!

Anyway, if you are ever in the Durham area, Ushaw is well worth a visit, or even an overnight stay, during which you can wander the deserted corridors of the College and the spooky grounds, with the rooks calling and the wind whistling, and pretend you are in a Harry Potter film…

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AI – Not good for emissions

I wrote last week about the impact AI is having on emissions. Generally, it does not look good. A report on the NPR website highlights that Microsoft has been even bolder than Google, saying it will be carbon negative by 2030. But AI is proving a problem here too. According to the firm’s sustainability report,?released in May, Microsoft said its emissions grew by 29% since 2020 due to the construction of more datacentres that are “designed and optimized to support AI workloads. The infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector.”

Might have been better if Microsoft had invested in better cyber security products, but that discussion is for another day…

Anyway it looks like many of the promises and targets set by big tech firms in terms of net zero will prove to be difficult or impossible to achieve. And that has a knock on effect for every firm that is a customer of the tech giants (in other words, almost every business). They are all trying to calculate scope 3 emissions, those generated by their suppliers. So the negative direction of travel from the tech firms will push all their customers in a negative direction too.

And sadly there just isn’t much in the way of alternatives, other than not using AI products and services at all. But as AI becomes embedded in standard Google and Microsoft products, it is not easy or sometimes possible to say “no, I don’t want your nasty energy consuming AI, thank you”.

This demonstrates one of the challenges of the whole Scope 3 movement, which I have discussed previously. For most firms, the influence they can have over large chunks of their Scope 3 emissions is limited to say the least. I’m not saying everyone should stop trying to measure and track Scope 3, but it is vital to realise that you are only achieving something useful if you can actually influence what is happening with your supply chain. That might mean looking at your requirements and specifications, supplier selection decisions, what you might include in contracts, and more. But I fear many are wasting their time on stuff that they really can’t affect.

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Hope on the horizon?

After I wrote last week about the AI issue, I got a message from Oliver Hurrey, one of the key people in the Sustainable Procurement Pledge (SPP). “I’m looking into the required decarbonisation of AI with my Scope 3 Peer Group and their IT/tech procurement teams soon. AI definitely feels like a worrying double-edged sword again here”.

Hopefully the Group can come up with some good thinking and potential actions, and share that beyond the group, maybe through the SPP.

There is some potential good news on the horizon too. Many very clever people are working on ways to reduce the energy consumption of AI, either by making the learning processes involved more efficient or by developing lower-energy kit. For instance, chipmaker Nvidia recently?unveiled?a new chip that was 25 times more energy efficient than previous models.

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A sad story about fruit

Moving away from climate onto other “purpose-related” issues, we sometimes forget just how prevalent modern slavery and its employment-related human rights abuse variants are around the world. And it doesn’t just happen in horrible factories in Asia or Africa.

A report in the Guardian focused on fruit pickers who had apparently paid substantial fees to agents in Indonesia to get jobs on a fruit farm in England. But after just a few weeks they were sacked and left out of pocket and far away from home. The sacking was because the workers just weren’t fast enough at their work. ?I don’t think you can blame the farm – they say plenty of other workers achieved the target fruit-picking rate, and no doubt their own margins are slim if they are selling to the supermarkets. ?But when you read that one guy sold his family’s land, as well as his and his parents’ motorbikes, to cover the ￡2,000 plus cost of coming to Britain in May and then found himself unemployed , it is very sad.

So are you sure there aren’t dodgy employment-related activities going on in your supply chain? At one extreme, there is “real” modern slavery, with people who just cannot escape their place of work (and that could be in a billionaire’s London kitchen or a nail bar in Manchester as well as in a factory a long way away).?

Cases like this fruit-picking case are at the other extreme; and in between we have people who pay money to get a job and have passports withheld or even family back in their homeland threatened if they don’t play ball with their employers or agents. We’ve seen more focus on this topic generally in the last 10 years but my perception is that its slipped a little from our front of mind priority list. It shouldn’t slip any further.

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Summer in the City

Summer arrived last week in the UK, briefly at least. But just to reduce our joy at the appearance of the sun at last, a report from campaign group Friends of the Earth says inadequate climate protections mean at least 6 million lives are at risk from extreme heat in England. Older people and young children were the highest-risk groups, with 1.7 million under-5s and 4.3 million people over 65 living in the heat-vulnerable neighbourhoods in England.

But other parts of world continue to suffer from even more extreme temperatures. We are now seeing severe food crises spreading across Africa, driven to a large extent by drought and other extreme weather. Some of these countries have seen failures of political leadership as well, so western countries and citizens maybe have less sympathy when you look at how (for instance) Zimbabwe’s leaders and elite have looted and devastated their own country.?

Now even countries such as Kenya, generally seen as African success stories, are suffering from political and social unrest, driven in part by corruption and economic problems leading to a failure to meet the needs of their citizens. (This is an excellent article if you want to understand more). But climate change is playing a part too.

It's easy to look away, but more famine, revolutions and wars in Africa in the medium term will lead to more global instability, and more refugees creating problems for “the West”.? No easy answers here, but if you think Labour are going to solve the refugee and immigration crisis with a few well-meaning discussions in Europe and recruitment of a “border security commander”, you are very na?ve. (Can anyone think of an example where recruiting one new senior civil servant ever led to meaningful change? ) This is going to get worse before it gets better and climate is playing a significant role in creating turmoil.

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Los Campesinos

One of my happiest Reading Festival memories is seeing Los Campesinos – a band I had never heard of – playing the smallest tent at Reading in 2008. A bunch of Cardiff Uni students, they exuded a crazed energy, with clever, heart-felt, emotional lyrics and music that combined punk energy and manic rhythms through which flashes of beautiful melody would occasionally emerge. ?

After a chequered career, they have gone independent and their first album for seven years is self-produced, released, and marketed. All Hell is out now and it is excellent. They have calmed down somewhat now, but still have charm, good tunes and a penchant for quirky song titles (“Adult Acne Stigmata” and “Coin-Op Guillotine maybe?)

Pitchfork website gave it an 8.5 rating which his pretty damn good by Pitchfork standards. Read that review if you want to know more, or just listen here. ?I really think I need to see them live again.