Sem2 Option 2: Sustainability

I am convinced that at a personal and professional level throughout your career you will find yourself dealing with the challenges of our relationship with the natural environment.  More than that, in your role as content-providers and communicators with organisations, suppliers, clients and wider stakeholders, you could (should?) become vital agents of change to lifestyles (starting with your own, perhaps!), business systems and processes and commerce to help us all to operate responsibly, respectfully and within  Planet Earth’s ecological means.

Depending upon the time we have together, we will ‘attack’ some (certainly not all) of the following elements below.  Given the limited time that we have (12 hours together in S2 2022-2033) we will leapfrog (jump over => i.e. not do) Part One and we will start at PART TWO: ‘Can the Planet Afford Me‘ (scroll nearly half way down this page).  OK?

1. Defining our terms:  (this element is what we are ‘leapfrogging‘ in 2023-2024 … so we will start at N°2 below) we hear a lot of ‘green/eco/bio/alternative/responsible’ terminology and we are seeing a proliferation of labels on all sorts of products and services … but what do they mean? More importantly – what do you and I believe that they mean (because we make decisions based upon what we believe rather than what things actually are). So when I talk about ‘x’ .. are you understanding ‘y’?
2. Can the planet afford me?  Am I (as the Brundtland Commission and its report ‘Our Common Future / Notre Avenir à Tous’  put it in 1987): ‘Living within the Planet’s ecological means’?  Let’s get personal with our planet – am I damaging it or making it a better place for those around me, those on the other side of the world and my future kids and grandkids?  Do I know how well you are / are not performing in terms of sustainability and do I care (enough) to actually DO something about it? Remember, when we go to work we are each one of us just ourselves – even if we are wearing a different (professional rather than personal) ‘hat‘: if we are not convinced about the environment and the need to be sustainable in our personal lives, we are hardly going to change in our professional lives.  So we need to start with the personal.  Your individual task will be to understand your impact upon the environment and the implications of this for Planet Earth and all the people on its surface presently and in the future.
3. Inhibitors – what is stopping each one of us from doing better? We will review our individual views concerning sustainability and our individual Carbon Footprint Test results and consider how we as a representative, multi-cultural group are performing.  If we can identify what is holding us back / preventing us from being more sensitive and sustainable then we can address it in order to improve ourselves and those around us be they students, staff, work colleagues, clients ……  Whatever way you look at it, we are ALL stakeholders in Project Planet Earth!
4. Action programme: personal, professional & political.  We will address our inhibitors systematically with a view to identifying potential solutions and how they might be put into action in order to stimulate positive change in the immediate, short, medium and longer term for ourselves, the UHA and Alsace: our responsibility for our corner of the world, if you like.

So – here we go!

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PART 1. Defining our Terms / understanding the context.

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The What. Before we go deeper into the world of ‘sustainability’ we need to look at the range of terms people use for it or aspects of it.   If we can’t agree on what something actually means, how can we then talk about it productively, let alone enter into any agreements?

In 20/21 the cohort is 15 in number: so 6 x teams of 2 and 1 x team of three please, to attack those topics shown in red.  NO DUPLICATION PLEASE!

NB.  Before you rush off to dictionaries and the sources identified and linked: THINK: what do YOU think the terms mean?  It may be interesting to discover afterwards how right or wrong your initial perception actually was!

1. Sustainability v Développement Durable.   The latter is often used as a direct translation for the former.  What do they mean?  Are they the same / might there be some important differentiation?  Definitions please…. and don’t just settle for one – they may be different!
2. Ethics v Morality. Both of these terms are used in the contextualisation of Sustainability and Développement Durable, BUT are these actually synonyms?  If not, wherein might lie the difference. Cite and attribute your sourses.
3. Max Havelaar (see: https://www.maxhavelaarfrance.org/)  v Fair Trade (commerce équitable – see: https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/.)   We are used to seeing these words and their associated logos on everyday products, but do we really know what they mean ?  Are they the same or are they significantly different?
4. ‘Bio’ v ‘Eco’ (as used here in France).  For example, there are ‘eco’ and ‘bio’ wines and food products on the supermarket shelves and on restaurant wine lists sitting side-by-side.  What are they ? Are they to all intents and purposes the same or are there subtle distinctions between the two – if so, what exactly?
5. Fair Trade Towns (see: http://www.fairtradetowns.org/) v The Incredible Edible. (see https://www.incredibleedible.org.uk/) – Also, relating to this, watch a spectacularly funny and revealing 10 minute TED Talk by Pam Warhurst. [Put subtitles on – she talks fast!]  These are both sustainability initiatives at the local/town/commune level, but what ARE they exactly and how do they differ? Has France taken up such ideas to the same degree?
6. The ‘Zero Waste Home‘ movement‘  v ‘Low Impact Living‘ (To start, see Lowimpact.org) What are these and how do they differ?  Are these just for dreamers, BaBa Cools and environment fanatics, or do they represent to some degree a rational way forward towards principles and practices which we could and should all adopt?
7. European Ecolabel for Tourist Accommodation Scheme v  Visit England’s Green Business Tourism Label systems (https://www.green-tourism.com/green-tourism-gradings/).  What are they?  How do they differ?  Is it confusing to have so many such schemes in operation – these two are by no means the only ones? (see http://www.ecolabelindex.com).  How many EU ecolabeled hotels in France and in Alsace? (See http://ec.europa.eu/ecat/hotels-campsites/en/fr/france). Compare this number with the number of Green Tourism Scheme graded accommodation establishments in England.  Why such a difference?
8. Food and general lifestyle carbon footprint calculators  v Earth Overshoot Day calculations . Identify and compare and contrast a number of these calculators.  Which do you consider to be the most revealing and why? Which ones are the best at identifying: the CO2 we produce individually; the number of planets we would need if everyone lived like us, whether we are living within our alloted ‘share’ of the worlds resources to hit global targets, the day in the year when we will have used up our resource allocation, the difference in impact of different dietary choices?
9. A new pair of blue jeans every three months (start with: a lifecycle analysis of jeans vid)  v a beefburger/cheeseburger once a week (start with this): what are their respective impacts upon the planet (water used/polluted … CO2 produced etc) and how do you feel about it?  Are there any lower impact alternatives for both which may be worthy of our consideration?
10. The 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development Report (Our Common Future/Notre Avenir à Tous a.k.a. The Brundtland Report) v Chief Seattle’s Reply 1854 (there are several versions of this, so please use this one.  130-odd years apart: but to what extent might Chief Seattle’s Reply have ‘foreshadowed’ the modern ‘Sustainability’ cause?
11. Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ (book and film – also see a 2017 revisit of Inconvenient Truth in the light of recent events), ‘Climate Reality’ project & ’24hours of reality’ initiative   v Climate Change Deniers (see an LSE article on the subject as a jumping off point, but do look elsewhere).  A bit like the X-Files, we say that ‘the truth is out there’ – but where does it lie?  Is there still any real doubt?  Who are the doubters (and who pays them)?

TASK Instructions (ASSESSED in pairs or individually) :

1. Choose ONE topic from the list above [arrange with other teams so that there is NO DUPLICATION].
2. where you are being asked to produce definitions, first (before you rush online) consider for yourselves the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY and HOW of the terms concerned…. then pool your thoughts and go online to see what the terms really mean.  How close were you?  Make notes of your findings (in English) to support feedback to the rest of the group in a plenary session. You will then be asked to informally and very briefly present your team definitions to the class  considering also the other questions I have put to you with your topic.  
   
3. Where you are being asked to do research, review materials or compare and contrast resources – follow the instructions, make notes of your findings (in English) to support an informal presentation (in English) to your classmates.
   

We will then have a plenary session / discussion to consider your findings and the following issues:

• Why are we talking about these terms today ….? ( – 25/30 years ago we weren’t….).  So where and why have they emerged relatively recently (Those having studied topic N°10 should be able to help us get started here)?  Are you aware of France’s role in the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior and how that catapulted environment to the front pages of our newspapers…?

• Who is and who is not listening to the ‘messages’ embodied by these terms?
• What proportion of ‘society at large’ would you say is:
  • aware of these terms – but neither subscribes to them nor is doing anything about them
  • aware & interested – subscribing to them in theory at least (head knowledge) but not really trying enough to adjust accordingly in practice (heart understanding promoting action).
  • aware, interested and actively trying to act accordingly, but feeling inhibited in making much progress.
  • aware, interested, trying and partially succeeding.
  • aware, interested, trying and demonstrably succeeding…..

PART 2. Can the Planet Afford Me?

Start with this in S2 23-24

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The entire world’s population is made up of individuals who all have decisions to make in their personal, professional (and perhaps even political) capacities… decisions which are a function of their values and beliefs, habits, preferences, cultures etc and subject to the pressures acting upon them (economic, socio-cultural, political etc). Our global sustainabilty is the sum total of our individual actions, so we had better start with ourselves before we criticise others: just how sustainable is my present lifestyle and what am I prepared to do about it (another way of saying ‘Can the Planet Afford Me?‘, if you like):-

• what about my consumption decisions?
• what about my impact upon the world’s resources?
• am I enjoying my ‘fair’ share of such resources or the ‘lion’s share’?
• do I care (enough) about other people’s right to a share?
• could/should / WILL I do more (am I prepared to have a little less so that others can have a little more)?
• am I prepared to do more……………………………..personally AND professionally?
• etc etc etc….

So, how are we going to address / go about this……?

To start this off,  I want you all to do a couple of  Carbon Footprint tests (in English, of course) in class and for each and evdry one of you to share ALL the results listed below (so make sure you record/download them AND that you understand what they mean:

• how many planets would we need if all the world’s population consumed like me / enjoyed my lifestyle?
• where do I stand in relation to the average in my country / rest of the world average – am I performing better or worse than these averages?
• where do I stand in relation to the targets the nations of the world agreed for 2020 in order to reduce CO2 emissions and keep the global temperature rise under 2°C for the century?
• how much CO2 am I personally responsible for producing?
• What is my ‘Earth Overshoot Day‘….(this measure imagines that on 1st Jan Mother Earth ‘gives’ every person on the planet and equal and fair share of the resources that it can provide – without reducing its ability to meet future generations’ needs in the future.  ‘Overshoot Day’ is thus the day of the year upon which you have no more of your share remaining.  Ideally ( = to stay within the Planet’s ecological means) we should all stretch these resources out until 31st December.  If we don’t do this, then effectively we are going into ‘debt’ to future generations who will not be able even to have the same ‘fair share’, let alone what we are merrily consuming.
  
• Taking all this into account, how do I feel about my results and their implications…?

The calculators you must use:

DO ALL THREE of these tests and record your results and keep them (and bring them to class to share with your colleagues – you MUST draw upon them in the work we will be doing in our thrd and in our final class together. The tests give you different outputs and I would like you to provide all of the indicators/results from the first TWO tests and maybe some interesting things you have discovered from the third….

• http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/
  • My scores (honestly!):
    • I am using 79% of my ‘allocation’ (i.e. what is ‘fair’ for me to use according to the 2020 targets – which I don’t think have been updated yet – though they should be in line with COP26 progress)
    • I produce 8.2 tonnes of CO2 (a compressed tonne of C02 is about a cubic metre – so 8 =>half the volume of my office) – about 20% less than the upper limit.
    • My impact is 50% LESS than the UK average (NB. France is just a little bit higher than the UK), BUT 50% MORE than the world average.  So my score may ‘look good’ – but it isn’t relative to so many people in the world who still can’t consume like me!!
• http://www.footprintcalculator.org/
  • My scores:
    • my personal ‘overshoot day‘ (because I am consuming more than the Earth can provide in any given period if everyone lived like me) – was 3rd Sept in 2017 … but by reason of air travel in 2018  this date had advanced to 17th June (my birthday, ironically) – i.e. it got much worse.   In 2019/20, with no parents to fly off to visit and with a more same and local consumption I was almost at the beginning of October – a full  three month’s short of what Mother Earth required of me.  For the rest of the year it is as if I have nothing left in the ‘bank‘ and I am going into an unauthorised overdraft situation – which I (or my kids and grandkids) will have to repay/bear the costs of.  With CoVid I expect to be almost stretching my consumption well into November…perhaps even further towards using no more than my ‘fair share‘.  BUT …. will I go back to ‘bad old habits’ once the CoVid ‘brakes’ are finally off….?
      
    • we would need 1.5 – 1.7 Earths if everyone were to live and consume like me ... better than the average for England or France  (which is nearer 2.5 – 3) but, of course, the problem is that we will only ever have the one planet Earth and we have to share it with more and more people every day: just take a look at the live ‘World Population Counter‘ … and be prepared for a shock.  I am writing this in the middle of the afternoon, and already the day has seen births exceed deaths by 250,000…. suggesting that more than three populations the size of France’s (67,000,000 x 3) get added to the sum total of humanity every year….  Sharing is going to become more and more of an issue…. especially if climate change means that yields of fundamental foodstocks go down (so prices go up above the level that a high proportion of the world’s population is capable of paying).

• https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46865204  .  Scroll down to the middle of the article. Embedded there you will find a calculator of absolute and relative food environmental impacts that, for everything from an apple to beef gives you an idea of its impact in terms of nutrition, C02, water consumption and shows you how much of the world’s land surface your consumption requires.  Have a look – it is quite startling (and I say this with a good dose of British ‘understatement‘!)

I am going to ask you to ‘pool’ your results in class and we will see what our class average is (and the highs and lows) and how this relates to the Earth’s resources.  I suspect you may be shocked by the results – I was shocked by mine!  The question will then be: what are we all prepared to DO about it in our personal and professional lives? ….. and what if we do next to nothing or not nearly enough?

THEN, TO DO

Then: in the light of your personal and class average results, I would like you to consider all aspects of your daily life and how you are living it (what you eat, what you wear, what you spend your money on, how you live in your home, how you travel etc) and make a candid (scrupulously honest) personal analysis and evaluation of your compliance with the principles of Sustainability in order to address the question:

« Can the planet afford me? »

If the planet can’t afford your lifestyle and consumption changes, what (perhaps a LOT more than just one or two things!)  EXACTLY is stopping you personally from changing to a lifestyle the planet can afford and how do you feel that such inhibitors to better sustainability performance in your life could be overcome? 

Your output will be a personal contribution (ASSESSED) to the work in class:

• sharing your footprint scores (S2 Class N°3).  This will be done during this class.
• contibuting your thoughts regarding your sustainability performance and the ‘inhibitors’ that are preventing you from perfrming better in sustaniability terms (S2 Class N° 4)
• Working in a team with your colleagues to present your solutions to a ‘cluster’ of inhibitors for which you have been given responsibility (S2 Class N° 4)

Please come to our final (S2 Class N° 4) having thought deeply about the following and being prepared to contribute your personal analyses. There are five key elements of this you will have to be ready for:

The question we will then go on to address in our final clas together is then: ‘Why aren’t we doing better?   What is stopping us’?  What needs to be done to overcome such things and by whom?        (In other words: we need to address these ‘inhibitors‘ – because unless we do, we will be unable to find solutions to overcome them,  our performance just won’t change and the hopes of preserving the world’s resources and the chances of keeping under a temperature rise of 1.5°C  – or perhaps even 2°C – will be lost…..).  If you want to know the significance of this, I suggest you view Mark Lynas’ videos on YouTube which deal with every °C+ change from 1°C to 6°C and its likely impacts and implications for human (and other) life on Earth.  Even 2°C is likely to be catastrophic for many…. and we have already passed 1°C….

In our fourth and final S2 class, then, we will consider:

• What could and should you (with the help of others?) do to overcome such inhibitors?
  • what can you actually do yourself that you can and will determine to do (you don’t need any more persuasion, support or forcing – you are doing it today and from now on)?
  • what would you do for yourself with a little practical help or persuasion (carrot) – what is it you need, in what form and from whom?
  • what is it that you simply choose not to do unless and until you are given no choice / forced to (the stick) – what is it that will need to happen such that you change?
  • are there things that are 100% intractable constraints that prevent you from acting within the planet’s ecological means, even with all the carrots and sticks applied?  What are they and why?

Q. How are we going to do this once you have each thought through the above? 

A. Brainstorm to:

1. contribute all the inhibitors you have thought of individually => a group master list
2. ‘cluster’ them together in ‘meaningful’ groupings under appropriate headings
3. assign a team (of size appropriate to the scale of the task) to address each cluster
4. each team to brainstorm up potential solutions for each item within the cluster in the following way:

• • what solutions may be possible?
  • which are likely to be the most successful, and why?
  • when the solutions should be put in place in the immediate [this financial year], short [1-3 years], medium [3- 5 years] or long term [5-10 years] and how long it might take to generate the desired results.
  • who should lead and participate in the action points needed to deliver the solution
  • how they should be put in place
  • how much it might cost and ways of defraying this cost
  • means of measurement.  What can we measure to identify the extent to which our solutions have been successful?

Each Cluster ‘Team’ will then deliver a short oral presentation. The method will be:

• Each Cluster Team should list the titles of all their solutions, THEN take just TWO of their cluster solutions (preferably the ones that you think are most needed, most urgent and most likely to succeed) and present them according the bullet point format above.  All members should contibute equally to the team’s oral presentation .
  • you MUST NOT merely read a powerpoint slide or pre-prepared statement
  • You may ‘TALK TO’ [NOT READ] a Powerpoint Slide [2 slides absolute maximum per person]…. You should use the slide(s) as a CUE – something that gives you the STRUCTURE of your presentation – something to jog your memory and remind you what you need to talk about next.
  • Two minutes per person should be enough (Guillotine applies after that time)

If time allows:

A Sustainability Action Programme for the FAC

Task: Thinking of our Cluster Solutions – how might these be applied within our Fac?

OK… here I need to give you a ‘nano-lecture’ for a minute: have you heard of ‘cascading‘ the American term used for the ‘translation‘ of objectives from the top of the organisation right down to the bottom through each and every level of heirarchy?  This involves the following steps:

1. Policy – the vision of the future to be achieved [where we are going]- made at the very apex of the organisation. Think President/ Board of Directors / the UHA Rectorat & President….
2. Programme – the who, what, why, when, where and how in the form of a step-by-step guide [to address the Q ‘How are we going to get there’?] Think the CEO/MD/PDG / the Dean
3. Procedures – sets of rules and regulations to be imparted throughout the organisation in order to realise the Programme and its Policy objectives Think divisional/functional heads and Senior Management / Departmental  & Course Directors.
4. Practices – coherent sets of actions to be implemented and managed by teams towards the base of the organisational structure as directed by the Procedures  (Course Teams & student associations and structures)
5. Performance – an action by an individual (teachers, administrators, students) which may be repeated many times as demanded by the Practices (which is, in turn, fully in accordance with Procedures, Programme and the ultimate achievement of the overall Policy objectives).

Clearly, an Action Programme needs to be VERY well thought out, because if even a little error or incompleteness happens at the top – the impact thereof is magnified at the bottom of the pyramid.

End of ‘Nano-lecture’!]

So…. if we have the time and Carsten Wilhelm and Hocine Sadok (the Dean of the FSESJ) just happened to come into the room for 15 minutes…. what would you say to them to secure their commitment to the improvement of sustainability across all aspects of our organisation and its stakeholders….?

I am hoping that the engagement with this topic area will enthuse and challenge you on both personal and professional levels – possibly even politically.   Let me know how it may have changed you!  T