Two days at the recent Conference on Greening Urban Growth in Penang allowed me to catch up on the latest thinking about the environmental impact of urban development. The impact of industrial pollution is with us every day, with daily smog, contaminated water and coughs and colds that don’t go away. In 2011, the population of the world reached 7 billion. It took 5,000 years for man to reach 20 million, but by 1800 it became 1 billion. In 1950, it was only 2.5 billion, which meant that in my life time alone, the population has nearly tripled. 

Man’s impact on nature comes primarily on our usage of energy. Canadian eco-scientist Vaclav Smil (www.vaclavsmil.com) remarked that in the Roman age, the annual energy consumption per capita was 10 gigajoules per capita. The average usage per American today is 34 times higher than the Romans’, with a life expectancy three times longer, meaning that we are consuming the earth’s resources at a geometric rate.

All life depends on photosynthesis, without which diversity of life simply dies. In Easter Island, the population disappeared when the last tree was cut down. Smil estimates that we have been depleting the earth’s biomass at a frightening rate, so greening our buildings and the way we live is imperative.

Climate warming is only another way of saying that the balance between man and our plant life has been seriously damaged. Our urban life is happier when we have more plant life around us.

I was not aware that 80 percent of carbon emissions come from cities, so that greening cities and making city lifestyle low carbon is critical to our happiness, health and survival. This conference, organized by the Growth Dialogue (the successor to the Growth Commission chaired by Nobel laureate Michael Spence) together with Think City of Penang, brought together renowned architects, urban planners, city officials from India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia and economists to try and bring inter-disciplinary approach to green urban living.

Australian system dynamics thinker John Mathews (www.docenti.luiss.it/mathews) argued that industrial capitalism that has reached the finite limits of the planet cannot be allowed to continue. If the current trend of migration into urbanization and middle income continues, there will be 6 billion middle class consumers by 2050, compared with 1 billion currently. A new model of consumption and production has to be developed.

Mathews argues that these new models are already being developed by the BRICS, led by China and followed closely by India and the others. He thinks that this new model will be based on a new industrial revolution, with major transformations in the energy market, creation of a circular economy (recycling) and moving from generic finance to targeted eco-finance. He has proposed the issue of climate bonds, which is targeted towards financing green projects, with the banks as gate-keepers to ensure that green standards are met. This is an idea well worth exploring in getting the financial sector toward serving the real sector better.

My conclusion from the growth dialogue was that everything exists to make the world more green, but we cannot seem to get the political will to make it happen. For example, the technology already exists for energy sustainability. The world is awash with savings and liquidity. Civil society has been mobilized for better ecological living. Urban planners and politicians all know that the people want to have better living. We all want green grids of smart energy, smart agriculture, smart lifestyles, but we end up with brown gridlocks.

This is a systemic problem of collective action traps, not just at local and national levels, but at the global level. Witness the gridlocks in global negotiations in Kyoto, Copenhagen and Doha that are mired in mutual blame.

With the advanced markets blaming emerging markets as the future sources of carbon emissions, the BRICS will have no alternative except to find their own growth models.

System-wide problems cannot be solved partially. We need a systemic and systematic way of thinking and acting on the interactive and interconnected way the world evolves. Systems-thinker Frithof Capra has argued that the “Development process is not purely an economic process. It is also a social, ecological, and ethical process ― a multidimensional and systemic process.”

For analytical purposes, we can divide development into four (could be more) interactive dimensions, business models, ambience and context, policies of government, and the architecture or topology of markets. Through their policies, regulation, taxation and enforcement, governments can impose change. Academic often propose good ideas for change. Civil society often opposes change, but it is through business models that change happens, for good or bad.

Hence, I am a believer that change will not happen until corporate social responsibility adopts within their core values of sustainability and humanizing the work place. Today, global corporations like GE and Siemens are already geared to help provide the hardware and software for smart and green cities. One of the challenges of turning around business models in Asia is that very often in extractive industries, the most “profitable” businesses are really the most polluting.

There is a famous blue ocean strategy for businesses to move out of crowded, less profitable, businesses in red sea into new areas. Perhaps it is time for business models to move out of brown (polluting) industries into green fields, because society demands a more sustainable living model.

How this can be done successfully is not up to businesses alone, but also up to government to set the right policies, academia to come up with the right physical and social technologies and for consumers to practice green living and change lifestyles. This is something that deserves more thought and discussion.

By Andrew Sheng

Andrew Sheng is president of the Fung Global Institute, a Hong Kong-based, independent and non-profit think-tank. ― Ed.

(Asia News Network)