Moving people towards sustainable consumption

I’ve been down in London for a couple of days this week. As the train whizzed through villages, towns and suburbs it struck me what a huge challenge we have moving to a sustainable economy. Every station car park was overflowing with metal boxes. Over the past 30 years the lifestyles and settlement patterns that have grown up have been driven by the availability of cheap personal transport – the car. Housing estates, business parks and retail parks have grown up away from rail links. Many have little or no bus service. Individuals have grown used to the convenience of personal transport available when they want it going to where they want to go....

And that’s only one dimension of the challenge….But big challenges are there to be tacked so here goes...

There are a couple of points, statement of the obvious may be, that need to be made at the start:
1. Let’s recognise that there is no ‘silver bullet’. We’re going to have to find and use a broad range of tools and approaches to move towards a sustainable world
2. This is not a one year change programme. There needs to be a vision of where we want to be (sustainable consumption) and some milestones en route
3. Let’s also recognise that we’re all different and that we’ll respond to different stimuli and incentives

And, whilst much can be achieved at an individual and local level, there’s also a need to make changes at in areas such as incentives, taxation and measurement. This needs to be driven by government.

I think that there is also a need to get opinion-formers, by which I mean mainstream press (beyond the Independent and Guardian) and possibly (given the society we live in) a few celebrities, actively supporting the sustainable consumption agenda otherwise laudable initiatives will be in danger of failing - sitting here now I can just imagine the Daily Mail’s or Sun’s response to the idea of a Citizen’s Income!

So, recognising we’re all different, and putting my marketing hat on, I’m keen that we identify and research the different segments of the population to understand:
1. The environmental issues and concerns that are their particular hot button
2. The size of the different segments
3. Whether they are early adopters of a new thing, followers, late adopters or luddites.

Given that we’re not going to change everything at once there’s a need for a bit of prioritisation so we can focus resources and effort on early adopters, the biggest consumer segments and those issues that are going to make the biggest impact.

There’s a range of practical measures and steps that can be piloted and, if successful implemented in full. Some of these I would see as mandatory that need to be adopted by the whole population (eg carbon credits), other would be discretionary. The research programme should help on how best to message the former and which segments to focus discretionary initiatives.

Measure that could help us move towards sustainable consumption could include the following:
1. Personal Carbon Trading
2. Loans and incentives to encourage the installation of energy efficient heating equipment – why not build repayment of the loan into the tariff paid for the energy?
3. VAT linked to carbon footprint of the product rather than value (Practical issues here I know) but it would be great to have different prices reflecting the carbon footprint for asparagus from the UK versus Peru.
4. Tax credits on income tax if you personal carbon usage falls below a certain threshold (linked to 1)
5. Removing subsidies from non-environmentally friendly activities and re-divert
6. Introducing a balanced scorecard of measures to track wealth (ie GDP plus other indicators)
7. Making it easier for individuals to change their work-life balance, and making it easier (and cheaper) for companies to hire individuals so there are more bodies to share the work around – look at scrapping NIC and replace with a series of taxes that green behaviour
8. Invest in transport infrastructure that means people have a viable alternative to the car
9. Actively promote alternatives to ‘shopping therapy’
10. Seek to reinvigorate local communities. The millennium lottery programme was really successful in getting local communities together to focus on a local project (be that a playing field, new village hall or new footpath). Why not have one in which lottery grants are given for sustainable consumption/energy saving initiatives?
11. More education on environmental issues in schools
12. Change building and planning regulations so that
a. Out-of –town developments are the exception rather tahn the norm
b. Public transport is an integral part of any new development rather than the afterthought it often appears to be today
c. All new offices, shops, factories and houses must incorporate energy-saving technology (eg PV cells, heat exchangers)

Not a bad manifesto that – we just need someone to adopt it! And that’s without the international dimension....