Posted under Express 179

The US felt the full impact of Super Storm Sandy, but it was a warning for Asia. The combination of coastal development, climate change and storm patterns has reached a point where the UN calculates that the Asia-Pacific region now “experiences more than 85% of global economic exposure to tropical cyclones.” And the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, say the latest climate report, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather. Read More

By Michael Richardson in The Straits Times (5 November 2012):

As Hurricane Sandy, with its devastating winds, rain, and ocean surges battered New York and other areas along the US Atlantic coast last week, another fierce tropical storm was sweeping through the South China Sea, hitting the Philippines, Vietnam and China.

Meanwhile, a cyclone churned across the Bay of Bengal, veering away from Sri Lanka at the last minute before striking southeast India, causing extensive damage.

Although much smaller in strength and size than Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Son-tinh that smashed into the northern Philippines, Vietnam and southern China killed as many as 30 people, forced more than 176,000 to leave their homes, and caused an estimated US$145 million in economic damage as electricity supplies, floods, and landslides disrupted normal life.

It was a reminder that cyclonic storms, drawing their destructive power from warming tropical waters and the moisture-laden atmosphere, are more of a menace in the Asia-Pacific region than anywhere else in the world.

Known as hurricanes in the Caribbean Sea and near the Atlantic Ocean coast of North America, and cyclones or typhoons in the South China Sea, Bay of Bengal, Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, these periodic storms are posing a major economic and social challenge to the Asia-Pacific region, according to a recent United Nations report.

Presented to a ministerial conference in Indonesia last month (23 October) on disaster risk reduction, the report warned that as regional growth and urbanisation have exploded in the past few decades, the number of people living in cyclone-prone areas has nearly doubled, to about 121 million.

Most new development in the region has been along coastlines and in floodplains, locations highly exposed to sea level rise, storm surges and inundation.

Sea levels are slowly rising from thermal expansion as the water warms and from the melting of land-based ice, particularly at the polar caps.

The combination of coastal development, climate change and storm patterns has reached a point where the UN calculates that the Asia-Pacific region now “experiences more than 85 per cent of global economic exposure to tropical cyclones.”

The Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2012 was published by the Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the UN’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). It received little attention in the media at the time.

But many climate scientists have warned in the wake of Hurricane Sandy that climate change and global warming caused by increasing global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels and clearing tropical forests, are intensifying extreme weather, including tropical storms.

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in the US, put it this way:

“The sea surface temperatures along the Atlantic coast (of the US) have been running at over 3 degrees Celsius above normal for a region extending 800 kilometres offshore all the way from Florida to Canada. Global warming contributes 0.6 C to this.

“With every degree C, the water holding of the atmosphere goes up 7 per cent, and the moisture provides the fuel for the tropical storm, increases its intensity, and magnifies the rainfall by double that amount compared to normalconditions.”

Summarising recent scientific research, the UN report said that the effects of climate extremes and variation suggest that while the number of tropical cyclones are not increasing in number, more of them are stronger.

With more than one third of the 305 Asia-Pacific cities in coastal areas, this makes the region more susceptible to ever greater potential losses from severe storms.

“Our shared challenge in Asia and the Pacific is to control both the growing rate of exposure and rising vulnerability,” said Singaporean NoeleenHeyzer, ESCAP’s executive secretary, when the UN report was released.

“Exposure to hazards has multiplied as urban centres grow and people and economic activities expand into increasingly exposed and hazard-prone land,” she added.

Some Asia-Pacific countries that have been hit hard by cyclones in the past have taken steps to better protect their coastal populations and economic assets.

For example, Bangladesh has invested over US$10 billion in coastal management and flood control, resulting in lower disaster losses.

However, many Asia-Pacific coastal cities are expanding chaotically, with many slums and little effective urban planning.

The lesson for the region from Hurricane Sandy must be to improve coastal urban planning, storm protection, and relief and recovery when disaster strikes.

This is expensive and will take time. But with so much economic growth at stake, tropical storm mitigation measures are an essential investment in Asia’s future.

The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies.

SOURCE: www.iseas.edu.sg

 

By Brian Vastag in Washington Post (9 November 2012):

Climate scientists agree the Earth will be hotter by the end of the century, but their simulations don’t agree on how much. Now a study suggests the gloomier predictions may be closer to the mark.

“Warming is likely to be on the high side of the projections,” said John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., a co-author of the report, which was based on satellite measurements of the atmosphere.

That means the world could be in for a devastating increase of about eight degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, resulting in drastically higher seas, disappearing coastlines and more severe droughts, floods and other destructive weather.

Such an increase would substantially overshoot what the world’s leaders have identified as the threshold for triggering catastrophic consequences. In 2009, heads of state agreed to try to limit warming to 3.6 degrees, and many countries want a tighter limit.

Climate scientists around the world use supercomputers to simulate the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Sophisticated programs attempt to predict how climate will change as society continues burning coal, oil and gas, the main sources of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide.

But these simulations spit out a wide range of warming estimates. All foresee an overheated planet in 2100, but some predict just three degrees of warming while others estimate eight or more degrees of extra heat.

“This problem has been around for 30 years,” Fasullo said. “As long as climate models have existed, there’s been this spread in projections of the future.”

One source of uncertainty involves the impact of cloud cover, especially clouds that form in the tropical and subtropical regions between about 30 degrees north and south of the equator.

“Tropical clouds are so important to climate,” Fasullo said. “Small changes in clouds near the equator have a big effect on where you end up” for temperature predictions.

As sunlight pours onto the tropics, clouds bounce some of that heat back into space. Fewer clouds open up the atmosphere “like an iris,” Fasullo said, allowing more heat to beam onto Earth’s surface.

No supercomputer is powerful enough to predict cloud cover decades into the future, so Fasullo and colleague Kevin Trenberth struck on another method to test which of the many climate simulations most accurately predicted clouds: They looked at relative humidity. When humidity rises, clouds form; drier air produces fewer clouds. That makes humidity a good proxy for cloud cover.

Looking back at 10 years of atmospheric humidity data from NASA satellites, the pair examined two dozen of the world’s most sophisticated climate simulations. They found the simulations that most closely matched humidity measurements were also the ones that predicted the most extreme global warming.

In other words, by using real data, the scientists picked simulation winners and losers.

“The models at the higher end of temperature predictions uniformly did a better job,” Fasullo said. The simulations that fared worse — the ones predicting smaller temperature rises — “should be outright discounted,” he said.

The most accurate climate simulations were run by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, a consortium in Japan and a facility at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“The biggest benefit of this study is really just a reminder to go back” and see how well climate models match reality, said Jimmy Booth, a post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, who was not involved in the study. Booth works on a climate model called E2, and he said his team can now reexamine how well it simulates humidity in the tropics.

The study is part of a quickening trend to improve climate simulations. Over the past decade, these computer programs have become “tremendously more sophisticated,” said Stephen Lord of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. International groups collaborate on simulations even as available computing power soars.

The first climate models, about 30 years old, simulated only the Earth’s atmosphere. The latest generation add the effects of ocean currents, the dwindling planetary ice cover, and even how plants and animals take up and release carbon.

“As you make those improvements,” Lord said, “the ability to simulate long-term climate gets better.”

Scientists not involved in the research said the report, funded by NASA and scheduled for publication Friday in the journal Science, could improve the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its next comprehensive report, due in 2013. The panel is a world body organized by the United Nations to guide policymakers as they struggle to curb and adapt to climate change. The world has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, a rise scientists nearly uniformly attribute to carbon pollution from fossil fuels.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Posted under Express 179

As we are confronted, almost on a daily basis, with news of environmental degradation and destruction, and information on ways to rectify and prevent them, isn’t it surprising that real actions by corporate leaders are few and far between. Some of the best examples of corporate sustainability, transformation and change management comes from “a moment of epiphany” – an experience of awakening to the impacts business operations have on the environment. To trigger this experience, business leaders will have to be immersed in the environment of their creation to fully realise the extent of their actions and cultivate a sense of empathy with those afflicted. Read more

 

An ‘inner journey’ lies behind many business leaders finding their sustainability voice – it’s time to better foster the conditions in which this can happen

By Jo Confino in Guardian Professional (9 November 2012):

It is often a moment of ‘seeing the light’, that drives corporate leaders to change direction.

All the science in all the world will not have the same impact without that one moment of revelation.

There is constant questioning in sustainability circles about why the very clear data on our parasitic impacts on Mother Earth is not leading to a drastic change in our behaviour.

But if you delve into the triggers for transformation among business leaders, it is often an epiphany rather than greater knowledge that leads to the raising of consciousness as well as concrete action.

Part of the reason for this is that the experience is often so deep that it momentarily knocks the ego out of the way; what shines through is a sense of knowing in which ambivalence has no shelter.

In this place, the relentless drive of short-term profits at the expense of the long-term health of the planet and the wellbeing of humanity shows itself to be hollow at best.

This is in no way to deride the importance of science and knowledge, both of which are absolutely critical in building a foundation for change. But intellectual awareness does not necessarily lead to courageous action.

I was speaking the other day to Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the respected Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, who recognises that scientific knowledge in isolation from inspiration is not going to bring the scale of change that is needed in the world.

Hoskins, one of the UK’s most respected climate scientists, said of “that moment of epiphany”: “Often what we do is provide the landscape in which St Paul can have his moment. I don’t believe these come from nowhere; they come from all the information around and then it clicks for someone. We are creating the ether in which people can have that illumination.”

The reason we don’t often hear about these Damascene moments in the business world is because they fall outside of what is considered to be the acceptable lexicon. It’s just not the sort of thing you discuss around the water cooler. They also tend to be highly personal and also difficult to describe in a way that does not demean them.

My own move, more than a decade ago, into the world of business and sustainability – both as a journalist and practitioner – was inspired by a moment of illumination, but I am careful with whom I discuss this.

One of the reasons I have personal respect for Jochen Zeitz, the chairman of Puma, is because he is prepared to talk about how his experience in a Benedictine monastery inspired his campaign for businesses to value nature through the creation of environmental profit and loss accounting.

Of course, epiphanies do not have to have a spiritual overtone and often are triggered by something very ordinary. Paul Polman, chief executive of Unilever, told me recently that his inspiration came from looking into his childrens’ eyes and recognising he would be failing them if he did not do all he could to ensure their future wellbeing.

The importance of inner experience

Someone who has been exploring this territory is Lynda Grattan, professor of management practice at the London Business School and chair of the World Economics Forum on leadership. She has been carrying out in-depth research into 60 companies and almost invariably finds their sustainability programmes have developed as a result of an individual’s inner experience.

“So much of my thinking about corporations is that it’s actually the people themselves that make a real difference,” Grattan tells me. “Almost always there’s somebody who has stood up and sometimes they are at the top of the organisation and sometimes they’re in the middle of the company, but almost always our stories begin with one person saying I absolutely believe in this and I want this to happen.”

So what has she discovered about these individuals? “When I look at those leaders, they are people who I would say have taken both an outer journey and an inner journey. Business schools and corporations are very good at the outer journey. We’re very good at training people in business strategy and how they do accounts and so on – and that, by the way, is really important because if a leader can’t do that then you don’t have a corporation.

“The inner journey is really about how the leader has found their voice, their courage, their authenticity, and what we’ve found is that inner journey seems to be really important for people who have been prepared to stand up. When I’ve talked to leaders who I think are making a difference, they almost always tell me about their own personal journey and very often that journey includes what we might call crucible experiences, things have happened to them that have given them the courage to now stand up and say ‘I’m prepared to do that’.”

Fostering the right conditions

Now, of course, you cannot buy epiphanies off the shelf and they tend to come at the most unexpected of times. But it is possible to create the conditions in which they occur and companies would do well to build these into leadership programmes.

The UK’s Business in the Community has for many years been running a Seeing is Believing programme which takes business leaders to poor areas of the UK to see first-hand the challenges that marginalised groups face.

I have been on several of these and while they are to be commended in principle, these half-day visits more often than not fail to lead to long-term change; the executives are not immersed in the experience for nearly long enough. They also focus on social injustice and do not expose business leaders to the environmental degradation that their companies could be complicit in.

Executives get a very different experience at India’s Hindustan Unilever: “One of the problems with some of the smartest people is that they’re not really grounded at all in the day-to-day issues of living in India, the day-to-day issues of poverty,” says Grattan. “So one of the things that Hindustan Unilever has done for years is take its young highest-potential graduates and put them into rural villages in India – some of which are very, very poor – and leave them there for up to one year.

“When I ask people in their fifties and sixties ‘why are you doing anything about poverty?’, it’s often because they say to me ‘I remember when I was 25 in that village and seeing that the kids didn’t have any shoes and didn’t have any hope’.”

So it seems pretty clear that if business leaders are to have a hope of transforming their companies, they need to come out of their ivory towers and get up close and personal to issues they are normally protected from.

As Grattan points out: “If a high-potential person spends all their time driving around in a limousine, they never really bring the outside in. They never really understand and empathise with what it’s like to be a mother bringing up a bunch of kids in a northern village in India where you are worried about where the next meal is going to come from.

“It’s impossible for us in the west to understand that unless we’ve actually got very close to it. So I think how organisations socialise high-potential people into issues like poverty and sustainability is really important.”

The full filmed interview with Lynda Grattan will appear on Guardian Sustainable Business in the coming weeks as part of a new video series

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Become a GSB member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Posted under Express 179

Like the proverbial chicken and egg, climate change and sustainability are inextricably linked; it is impossible to decide which comes first, but urgent solutions are needed. Ken Hickson delivers a timely lesson on the four E’s of Sustainability—energy, environment, economics and ethics. Read more

Climate change is generally accepted by over 90 per cent of the world’s scientists as being human induced. Like road accidents or nuclear disasters, it is definitely not an act of God as we still label various “natural” disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and floods.

Remarkably, we are seeing scientific evidence today that points the finger at climate change as the trigger for major geological events. Rising sea levels, dramatically reduced arctic ice and melting glaciers—and perhaps even the extraction of oil, gas and minerals out of the earth—can set off a geological chain reaction leading to earthquakes and tsunamis.

If that is stretching our faith in climate scientists – and prompting a storm of protest from the climate deniers and sceptics—let’s just settle for all the other evidence we have that our climate is changing and that the result is an increase in extreme weather events, rising sea levels, higher average temperatures, more out of control bush fires, and the prospect of climate refugees displaced by any of these events.

We have to accept there’s a nexus here. Climate and its consequential impact can no longer to be separated from all the other essential resources we need: Water, food, energy.

Start of Sustainability

So here’s where sustainability comes in.

Man has long exploited the planet’s natural resources, but the exploitation, especially in the burning of fossil fuels, really started in earnest with coal and the Industrial Revolution (between 1750 and 1850 in Europe). But our natural resources are finite. The usage at current levels cannot go on. It is not sustainable, especially when there is a preponderance of evidence linking the effects of our energy consumption with climate change.

Arguably, the first person to really put two and two together was Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius.  In a paper he presented in 1895, he came up with the theory of the importance to climate of carbon dioxide (CO2) content in the atmosphere, which he labelled “the greenhouse effect.”

First, he determined how much cooling might result from halving the earth’s CO2 content during a long period without volcanic activity. Then he turned the equation around to demonstrate what would happen if industrial emissions grew enough to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. He predicted a warming of about 5 degrees Celsius, which at the time he believed might take another 2000 years to happen.

The Nobel Prize winner for chemistry could not possibly have predicted the rate of industrialisation – or the hell-bent extraction and burning of fossil fuels—which has taken climate change and temperature rise to the brink in 200, not 2000, years.

We need to be clear about what sustainability means.

There may be as many definitions of sustainability and sustainable development as there are groups trying to define it,  but all have to do with:

•Living within the limits

•Understanding the interconnections among economy, society, and environment

•Equitable distribution of resources and opportunities

 

Some quotable quotes on sustainability:

•             “Sustainability is the next transformational business megatrend…” – David Lubin from the Sustainability Network and Daniel Esty from Yale University.

•             “Sustainability is the biggest issue facing business in the 21st century…”  – Bill Ford, chairman of Ford Motor Company.

•             “Fortune 1000 Executives are aware of their own company’s green efforts, but join the general public in ongoing skepticism of corporate America’s commitment to sustainability.” – Gibbs & Soell Sense & Sustainability Survey 2011.

•             “Sustainable development is…meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs…” – The UN-commissioned Brundtland Report in 1987.

•             ”93% of 766 CEOs surveyed believe that sustainability will be ‘important’ or ‘very important’ to the future success of their company…” – Accenture and the UN Global Compact.

There is an argument that sustainability is about at least three critical components—people, profit and planet or the “triple bottom line,” which was coined by the leading proponent of sustainability, John Elkington.  But in my view, sustainability is achieved through four, not three, components. There has to be a balance of four E’s: energy, environmental, ethical and economic factors.

Why Energy?

It is not sustainable for a company or a country to be totally reliant on the burning of fossil fuels to provide the energy it needs.  Burning fossil fuels is damaging the planet through pollution and excess greenhouse gases. We are rapidly depleting the earth’s resources, and there must be a more sustainable alternative.

Switching to cleaner, greener and renewable energy, like wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, tidal, wave and biofuels is a must.

Energy efficiency is also a viable and attractive option. In 2007, Google launched a Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy. Google.org’s Clean Energy 2030 Plan proposes shifting the global economy from one that depends on fossil fuels to one that is based on clean energy.

GE’s Ecomagination  project puts billions into clean energy investments around the world. In October last year, it announced an expansion of its footprint in India to connect with one of the country’s fastest growing clean energy developers. The GE unit will invest US$50 million – its first renewable energy investment in India – to support the development of 500 megawatts of wind projects. It is a small part of GE’s US$6 billion portfolio of renewable energy investments worldwide.

Why Environment?

We need to sustain life on earth. Human life depends on nature. We need biodiversity. Plants absorb CO2. Clean water and productive land for food are reliant on a healthy environment.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, nature is the unseen dimension of the nexus of energy, water and food, “With its functions integral to the three securities and their inter-dependence, nature is part of the infrastructure needed to manage the nexus and its resilience. Nature helps mediate the nexus links….without healthy ecosystems in well-functioning watersheds, the infrastructure built for irrigation, hydropower or municipal water supply does not function sustainably, and is unlikely to achieve the economic returns necessary to justify investments.”

There is an obvious nexus between the environment and energy, water and food – just as there is a strong connection between sustainability and climate change.

It is simply not sustainable on any level to continue to use up the earth’s resources – oil, coal, gas – as they are not replaceable or renewable.

Interface, which is the world leader in the design, production and sale of environmentally responsible modular carpet, has issued a call to action for other companies, large and small, to set bold goals in the pursuit of sustainability.  Its “Mission Zero” is a commitment to eliminate negative environmental impact by 2020; the company pledges to obtain third-party validated environmental product declarations on all InterfaceFLOR carpet tiles globally by this year.

Why Economic?

Look at the economies that are out of shape and unsustainable: Greece, Italy, and Spain. There’s a need to have a balanced budget. Money might make the world go around, but when it gets out of hand – through overspending or mismanagement, even greed—things come crashing down.

Sustainable development means meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

We can no longer pursue profit at all costs. Or growth at all costs. Economic factors—for business, for communities, for countries—must be in balance with the other three.

Launched in 1999, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index  tracks the financial performance of the leading sustainability-driven companies worldwide. Top of the list in different sectors are Adidas, BMW, Coca Cola, Intel, Philips, Samsung (Technology), Siemens, Swiss Re and Westpac, while Singaporean businesses include CDL and Keppel Land.

Why Ethics?

Usually, we connect with ethics under a kindlier term—social or people factors—but ethical behaviour is as essential for business as it is for nations. That means transparency, compliance, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility.

Ethics impacts on labour policies and trade practices. It means running the business in a way that benefits all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

Nike got into big trouble a few years back when it was revealed that their foreign manufacturing plants used child labour to make its running shoes and soccer balls. After initially denying it, Nike had to back-track under pressure from consumer groups and NGOs like Oxfam, who produced evidence from around the world.

Being Clear about Sustainability

The Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) defines sustainability “a business approach that creates long-term shareholder value by embracing opportunities and managing risks deriving from economic, environmental and social developments”. The definition is observed by many of the companies listed in the index.

According to the DJSI, corporate sustainability leaders achieve long-term shareholder value by gearing their strategies and management towards harnessing the market’s potential for sustainably produced products and services, while at the same time successfully reducing and avoiding sustainability costs and risks.

It makes perfectly good commercial sense too.  Sense and sustainability go together. Of course, there will be plenty who will scoff and suggest sustainability is just another costly exercise dreamt up by “greenies” masquerading as management consultants. But being responsible goes beyond being green. Ethical and environmental, as well as economic factors and energy also figure in the equation.

If companies are smart about the way they produce and distribute their products, they can actually save money – as well as energy, water, waste and other resources – and make more money for themselves and society. A great example of this, WalMart’s supply chain management, is now being taken notice of by many other businesses, including its competitors.

Ken Hickson’s 12 Steps Towards Sustainability in Business:

1.            Commit to the sustainability journey – this must come from top management who must set principles and plans, set targets and appoint teams.

2.            Get good advice – there are good consultants around to advise and assist. The Singapore Compact for Corporate Social Responsibility and the Singapore Business Federation can point you in the right direction.

3.            Get certified – Start with a Green Biz Check or an Eco Office certification. You can aim for an ISO standard, in particular the ISO 14001 for Environment Management or the latest ISO 50001 for Energy Management. Go for gold on the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Compact or the DJSI.

4.            Engage an energy auditor – call on one of the 17 Energy Services Companies accredited by the National Environment Agency (NEA).

5.            Become energy efficient – look into all the ways you could become more energy efficient as an organisation. Look at your utility bills and install effective meters to measure your energy. Look to introduce enterprise sustainability platform into your business.

6.            Find the bottom line benefits – it won’t take long to discover that becoming sustainable can save and make money for the business. You can get really sophisticated and explore the marginal abatement cost curve developed by McKinsey.

7.            Commit to water and waste management – there’s money to be made by saving water, reducing waste and recycling too. The Public Utilities Board and the NEA can help you.

8.              Set high ethical standards – be transparent, practise good corporate governance, and be    ethical in all your business dealings whether at home or abroad. Take all these areas into   account for ethical behaviour: Cultural, personal, professional, political, religious, racial,  trade, business, legal, financial, environmental and social.

9.            Corporate Social Responsibility – also called Corporate Sustainability & Responsibility by Dr Wayne Visser, CSR helps an organisation bring together all the necessary and good business practices.

10.          Embark on sustainability reporting– Guidelines have been produced by the Singapore Stock Exchange to help listed companies produce reports on sustainability in the same way they would financial reporting.

11.          Communicate effectively with all stakeholders – it is essential to communicate within and outside the organisation to demonstrate that you mean business and to showcase your goals and achievements.

12.          Commit to environment and community projects – becoming a good corporate citizen is part and parcel of your sustainability journey.

Walmart states quite clearly what it stands for: “To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy; to create zero waste; to sell products that sustain people and the environment.” Not content to do all it can for itself, it also leads the business world by getting its supply chain on board the sustainability process.

That’s real sustainability in action.

Along with sense and sustainability should be success and sustainability. It can work and it does work. We just have to wake up to the issues as well as the opportunities presented by climate change and sustainability.

 Ken Hickson is Chairman and CEO of the Singapore-based consultancy Sustain Ability Showcase Asia which he set up in 2010.He first came to Singapore in 1983 as a consultant to Singapore Airlines and remained here for 17 years. He spent ten years in Australia (end 2000-2010) lecturing in communication studies at the University of the Sunshine Coast, where he was associate professor adjunct. He is the author of the highly-regarded 2009 reference work, “The ABC of Carbon”, about the issues and opportunities related to climate change.  kenhickson@abccarbon.com

For a pdf version of the article go to:

http://www.lcsi.smu.edu.sg/downloads/SocialSpace2012-KenHickson.pdf