Susdev.info

You can forget cats and pigeons - these days, it’s more orangutans and a Dove, as Greenpeace demonstrated earlier this week.

Protesting against Unilever’s use of palm oil (due to the signifiant tracts of Indonesian rainforest and peatlands being destroyed to make room for the palm), Greenpeace briefly inhabited the offices of Lexis PR, JCPR and Ogily, all of which work for Unilver’s Dove brand.

As far as I’m aware, the targeting of a firm’s consultancies (as opposed to the firm itself) is an unprecedented move by an NGO, and perhaps signifies a wider trend that people are beginning to look much more at the ethics of the system in which a company operates, rather than just the company itself? After all, NGOs regularly engage with companies and customers - why not expand the reach and engage with consultancies as well!?!

Greenpeace claim that instead of protesting against Ogilvy et al., they were actually calling on them to pressure Unilever into changing their policies on the use of palm oil in their products.

This is a rather wonderful and fascinating strategy in my opinion. It seems to me that Greenpeace have basically come up with a cheap, simple way of marketing themselves and their campaign, while also leveraging another resource for their campaign - the PR agencies. By engaging with them, these agencies may now start to pressure Unilever to make some changes. After all, the agencies have to think about their reputation and the potential business they might lose by not acting. Mariana Paoli strengthens this idea, mentioning in a PR Week podcast that PR agencies are commonly full of young, globally enfranchised people, who are more likely to be concerned by these revelations.

Is no one, therefore, safe from the campaigners these days? I hope not! Life would be too dull!

As time draws ever nearer to the London elections on May 1st, I’ve been looking at how environmental and social issues are or aren’t been communicated by the candidates (note: whether the winning candidate’s rhetoric turns into reality remains to be seen!).

From reading through the information booklet sent to all Londoners, it’s clear that the candidates appear to fall into several distinct categories with regards to their sustainability policies:

All of the mainstream parties (Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem) and the Green Party address a range of sustainability issues, such as improving public transport, reducing crime, providing more opportunities for youths, etc. Within these, however, there are differences of opinion over what constitutes good social, environmental and economic management. Labour, for example, will ensure that the new £25 congestion charge is enforced, while the Conservatives would scrap it. 

The BNP, UKIP, Christian People’s Alliance and Christian Party and English Democrats seem to steer clear of environmental issues on the whole. The Christian People’s Alliance and Christian Party don’t even give one word to environmental sustainability! The BNP and UKIP cover it, but only insofar as proposing to scrap the congestion charge (and do what instead?).

The Left List takes a similar view to the mainstream parties, but with a definite anti-corporate agenda - that big business is responsible for putting profits before the planet.

What’s particularly interesting for me is how parties such as the BNP, UKIP, Christian People’s Alliance and Christian Party and English Democrats don’t seem to have grasped the holistic nature of sustainability; that the ‘micro’ issues they hold so dear are wrapped up in more major geosociopolitical trends. For example, what do the BNP think will happen to imigration levels when climate change really starts to kick in? If they think it’s bad now, give it a few decades of unabated fossil fuel consumption… In illustration, the IPCC has suggested that by 2050, there could be as many as 150 million environmental refugees globally. That’s six times the current amount.

I just can’t see any future for political parties that remain so isolated from reality - the world is too complex. The majority of the public will only want to see more understanding of this from their political parties in the future, not less.

It’s pretty obvious that communications alone won’t solve the sustainability crisis. Underneath them, we need ambitious technological and policy-based solutions to facilitate the transition from unsustainable to sustainable.

With this in mind, the 2008 UK budget was lacking in more areas than I care to think about. Where were the big ideas that we so desperately need?

In illustration, the threat of a government enforced plastic bag tax if companies don’t introduce one themselves is pretty weak - there’s not even a mention of how much this might be! If it’s only 5p (M&S have recently announced a 5p plastic bag charge), then I don’t hold much hope. It does, of course, depend on the supermarket and who shops there, but I think we’re going to need to some significant charges introduced to make a real difference.

 As an aside on the plastic bag issue, I saw on the news recently that several of the big environmental NGOs didn’t wish to comment on the subject when the budget was released. I can understand their reasoning for this (that there are many other issues with more profound environmental and social impacts) but plastic bags still point to much wider issues in our throw away society and shouldn’t be ignored.

The proposed petrol charge increase is also pretty unimpressive - again, a few pence here or there is unlikely to lead to profound behavioural change.

On the plus side (it’s always nice to have something positive!), I like the showroom tax of £950 for cars which produce the most emissions – a clear application of the polluter pays principle. Whether it will have a deeply profound influence on behaviours remains to be seen. My guess is that we’ll see some real change with the less expensive cars (i.e. not the Porches, Ferraris and Lambourghinis).

If you’re interested, here’s the Guardian’s summary of the environmental side of the 2008 UK Budget - a useful source of information.

In summary, I believe that to truly tackle the sustainability crisis, governments the world over are going to have to do a lot better. Currently, in the UK at least, I think we’ve got too much of the wrong kind of stick, and not enough carrot.

Just picking up on yesterday’s Energy Saving Day aka ‘E-Day’.

E-day was designed to show people that the effects of small, personal behavioural changes to reduce energy use are actually pretty substantial en masse.

Taking place between 6pm on Wednesday 27 February 2008 and 6pm on Thursday 28 February, the campaign asked people to leave off household electrical items, which do not need to be on, and leave these items off for as long as possible. The effects of this on energy demand from the National Grid were then shown on the E-Day homepage.

In short, the social experiment wasn’t hugely successful. In fact, according to BBC News’s energy data (courtesy of the National Grid), energy use appeared to rise above expected levels for much of the day. Ouch.

If you look at E-Day objectively, it has many of the attributes of a winning campaign formula; The website, for example, is good - clear information and a nice design. The press also covered it quite extensively, so, arguably, there wasn’t a problem with audience pickup. There are also a huge range of stakeholders, both from the corporate and NGO sectors, which will have really helped to reinforce the message. Finally, the campaign outreach was impressive, with a launch event at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Why then, was it not a hit? I think that the main problem was in the messaging (or, at least, the way it was interpreted by the media), which seemed to focus on the moral imperative of saving energy. The trouble with this is that when it comes to issues such as climate change, there are certain things that the general public are not motivated by - one being morality. It’s too much of a leap from day-to-day life for most people. It probably would have been more effective, for example, to look at the potential cost savings involved (especially with the current credit crunch crisis).

Having said all that, hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I should say, in conclusion, good on Matt Prescott - the creative force behind E-Day - for getting out there and attempting to influence human behaviour and for mobilising a truly impressive bunch of stakeholders. No mean feat, let’s face it!  It’s a shame that E-Day was not the success many expected it would be, but hopefully some useful lessons can be learnt for the future.

Fascinating BBC news article published recently about the notable use of the colour green and ‘eco’ iconography in advertising.

The author, Rebecca Swift - global creative planning director for Getty Images - mentions how many of the environmental adverts we’ve seen in recent years actually all use the same narrow range of green colours/naturally-inspired imagery (think dishevelled polar bears, green leaves and clear blue rivers) in their adverts, across the spectrum of brands and products.

The reasoning for this seems quite simple - to try and connect consumers with a product and it’s claimed environmental credentials on the simplest possible terms i.e. people see the archetypal features of a healthy environment and automatically associate that with the brand or product.

Swift says that this will change in the future, and I completely agree. In fact, you can already see a small but definite change.

Let’s face it, consumers are now much more sustainability-savvy than they were just a few years ago, and won’t be as easily swayed by the emotive use of some animals or trees. Companies in the future will have to start focusing more on the environmental/social credentials of the product/brand (and indeed the company) behind the advertising rather that the reverse of this (which is what we’ve witnessed previously).

Aside from this, it’s really interesting that green in particular was adopted as the colour of choice environmental movement. Why not the blue of the sky or the ocean, or the yellow of sand or the brown of the earth? After all, they’re all integral parts of the environment. Any thoughts from anyone on this?

As an FYI, the BBC article was part of a larger piece by Getty(unfortunately only available by purchase) which looked at 2500 ‘green’ advertisments and analysed any trends in colour/imagery used. Undoubtedly fascinating, if somewhat expensive, reading!

Yet another story last week debating the environmental benefits of biofuels, this time from a couple of eminent scientists writing in Science (the Independent’s analysis is pretty good).

So the gist of this is that biofuels (like many things in sustainability) are complex. Their environmental credentials depend heavily on what the crop is, where its planted, what’s removed to make space for it to be planted, etc. Shockingly, for example, the report states that when Indonesian peat land is converted to harvest palm oil, it takes 423 years to neutralise the carbon produced - not exactly the environmental silver bullet we’re all striving for then! Obviously, there are some crops / areas of the world which don’t have as great a carbon impact, but, at the moment, this just doesn’t seem to be a robust, scalable low-carbon product.

Now this has real implications for sustainable communications. The confusion generated through biofuels and their true environmental benefits is just going to hinder any efforts to create a credible face for sustainability. Let’s face it, we need to make the sustainability ‘journey’ as easy as possible for people by aligning government and business actions, creating an infrastructure for change to occur, and promoting these with simple, engaging communications strategies.

In my mind, one of the current problems preventing a sustainability paradigm shift is there’s too much choice and not enough clear information. Naturally, information alone isn’t enough, but it’s an essential starting point.

While watching last week’s Panorama on the cocaine trade (a shocking if somewhat underwhelming programme, as it happens), I was struck by a number of similarities between the cocaine trade and climate change. Three things, in particular, sprung to mind:

Perhaps most notable is the sheer complexity of both systems; both involving countless actors spread across spatial and temporal domains (the latter being especially profound in the case of climate change). An interesting article in Grist looking into the complexities of climate change puts it well by saying that the issue is, at the same time, too big and too small (and that goes for coke too). In other words, while the effects (climate change, drought, loss of livelihoods, social inequity, gang warfare, and so forth) are huge, the affectors are often small, subconscious behavioural choices, that pass unnoticed in day-to-day life.

Second  is the severe level of blame that seems to arise in both of these issues. In the case of cocaine (and this is put in slightly simplistic terms); dealers blame the users for demanding the supply; users blame the dealers for supplying the demand; and the Government blame both parties. In the case of climate change, the blame arises between industry, Government and the public.

Finally is the prevalence of social inequity; a clear divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.

So what does this all mean for those working in sustainability communications? Well, quite frankly, it means that we’ve got our work cut out for us! With that caveat in mind, however, it also means that there are a huge number of opportunities available to create change.

Both imagery and messaging must be carefully managed to ensure that the audience can, simultaneously understand both the enormity of a lack of action and the simplicity of the action (the below advert by the WWF perfectly exemplifies my point here).

Research into pro-environmental/social consumer behaviours is becoming increasingly robust these days. Defra (see their lengthy but fascinating recent report) is just the latest example of an organisation investing some serious resources to really get under the skin of the modern consumer to see how sustainable consumption measures might be implemented in the future.

Now, it’s patently obvious that these kinds of insights are gold dust for those working in sustainability communications. Consumption is a wildly complex subject, drawing on economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc., and it’s far more efficient to spend some time at the start garnering a true sense of how sustainabillity comms. strategies should be shaped, rather than rushing in and grabbing blindly at the first glitzy idea - it probably won’t work.

Where I feel that we need more emphasis, however, is on bridging the gap between ‘concept’ and ‘delivery’ - on ensuring that those people on the ‘front line’ of sustainability comms. (i.e. the marketeers, PRs, brand consultants, etc.) really ‘get’ the impacts of said research.

Both Futerra (with ‘The Rules of the Game’) and the WWF (with ‘Let Them Eat Cake’) have made important progress in this space, but it would be great to see this kind of thinking expanded across all sustainable consumption research i.e. that along with the lengthy research reports (which do, of course, have serious merit), more pragmatic conclusions are produced and disseminated to ensure a proper bang for one’s buck.

I’m off to read the Defra report now!