FAN Club (Futures Analysts’ Network) Newsletter

September 2009

Our environmental future

FAN Club met at the London Wetlands Centre on September 16. Built on the now redundant Thames Water reservoirs in Barnes, west London, the Centre was an appropriate place for us to contemplate Our Environmental Futures, the theme for the day.

The full programme is here.

Peter Newman

UK climate projections

We began the day with a presentation from Dr Peter Newman, a DEFRA scientific expert who presented the impact of climate change on the UK. As befits the big-picture approach we favour at Foresight, Pete – whose first career was as an astronomer - began with a look at the Earth in its astronomical setting. He pointed out that the atmosphere that we are now all worrying about is heated by a variable source called the Sun and is also minutely thin – just a few kilometres of air at the pressure we encounter at sea level. If you look at a building that is ten miles away, there is more air between you and the building than there is between you and outer space.

In this context, there is no point worrying about Peak Oil or Peak Coal. The amount of carbon in the fossil fuels we have available is enough to alter the climate catastrophically. So we need international agreements not to release it.

The medium scenario of the UK Climate Projections 2009, which we are more or less following now, suggests that an average summer day the UK will be 3-4° warmer in the 2080s. This means that sea level will be 36cm higher, and rainfall up to 23 per cent less in the summer and 23 per cent higher in winter. This will involve more floods, more building subsidence in cities, and more pests, diseases and changed growing cycles for agriculture. But there will also be opportunities: Pete seems especially keen on the prospect of the UK re-establishing itself as a major wine-producing region. If you have any spare cash, you should aim to buy south-facing land in Northumberland.

Pete’s introductory slides are here; the technical slides he presented are in the Adapting to Climate Change presentation which is available on the UK Climate Impacts Programme web site.

Alister Wilson

The Perfect Storm

This theme of the demands we are making on the Earth was followed up by Alister. He analysed the three components of the Perfect Storm of pressures which are likely to affect the world by 2030. The idea of the Perfect Storm has been popularised by John Beddington, the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and head of the Government Office for Science.

The three elements of the storm are demand for food, water and energy: can we meet these demands at all, let alone in an equitable and sustainable way, 20 years from now? Population will have exceeded eight billion, up from six billion now. Energy demand will be up, especially from India and China, and most of it is likely to be met from fossil fuels. And by 2050, there may be seven billion people living in water-stressed areas. In terms of food, growing populations and changing tastes will mean bringing an extra area twice the size of France into agricultural production by 2030 even before we think about climate change.

See Alister’s presentation here.

Stephen Bass

Making the transition to a low carbon economy

DEFRA is one organisation on the front line of the UK response to climate change. We heard about the steps it is taking from Dr Stephen Bass, who is project leader on the low carbon economy and eco-innovation in Defra’s sustainable consumption and production programme. Stephen’s team works with other key Whitehall departments, including the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, to coordinate the development of cross-Government policies to drive the speedy transition to a Low Carbon, Resource Efficient Economy.

Stephen outlined recent developments, including the focus of the recent Low Carbon Industrial Strategy on actively supporting nascent technologies and solutions to meeting the challenge. Stephen also outlined the importance of Resource Efficiency; saving energy, water and waste will be critical to delivering an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Research shows that businesses are missing out on £6.4bn or 2% of profit cost savings through simple measures that would pay back in a year, and much more if a longer-term view is taken. Stephen’s work is currently focussed on helping businesses realise these cost savings, and to take the opportunities in the still rapidly growing Low Carbon & Environmental Goods and Services market. The government’s low-carbon transition web pages are here.

Gary Kass

Our environmental future

Responding to these pressures is a priority for many organisations, but none more than Natural England. Gary Kass,sacrificed his birthday to tell us how the policy process might work in an era of environmental change. His canvas was not just an English one: the UK feels the effects, for example, when the Greenland ice sheet melts rapidly, as it is now showing signs of doing. Our reaction to such change is influenced by science. This can require scientists to express opinions more decisively than they have done in the past. But it also calls for legitimate policy-making with public support. This means that we need better politics which can cope with applying the precautionary principle more widely, as well as better and more democratic science.

See Gary’s slides here.

Panel discussion

The panel discussion of all these presentations ranged widely. But there was a specific debate about whether a major eco-disaster was needed to bring these issues to the fore in the public imagination. One answer was that if we did our job of alerting the world to the changes it must now face, the need for a disaster and the accompanying loss of life would be that much less. Another questioner asked members of the panel whether they see enough being done in government to achieve this level of communication. Alister’s observation, based on his experience of facilitating conversations around government, was that climate change has now become a universal theme. This has happened very quickly, which he suggested, is very positive. He added that the conversations he witnesses in groups outside government suggest that civil society is very open to government providing direction and leadership on what has to be done.

The next agenda item was lunch. And the weather was so good that many of the 72 delegates who came to the session went to visit the birds at lunchtime, with the help of the Wetlands Wildlife Trust’s expert guides. Learn more about the Centre, London’s biggest green visitor attraction, here.

Harry Woodroof

The plight of the bumble bee

The afternoon began with two varied presentations. One was the first Futurescope from Dr Harry Woodroofof the Foresight Horizon Scanning Centre. This series of FAN Club sessions is designed to get delegates thinking about a future problem that they may not have encountered. Today’s was the vital issue of pollinators, without which many crops and other plants cannot reproduce.

If you think of pollinators at all, you probably think of bees. But Harry explained that birds, reptiles and mammals also carry out pollination, as do flies, beetles and moths, and for some species (including wheat, rice and maize) the unassisted wind. A third of global food production comes from animal-pollinated crops, including £140 million of UK agricultural and horticultural output pollinated by honey bees. Many medicines are also derived from animal-pollinated plants.

Pollinators are endangered by habitat loss, the arrival of invasive species, and the effects of agricultural chemicals. Their role is also imperilled by climate change shifting the habitable zones and the timing of the seasons. Birds, bats and other pollinators are listed amongst endangered US species. In the UK, a variety of causes, from electromagnetic radiation to parasites, have been blamed for the disappearance of worker bees from bee colonies. If pollinators vanish, our water and carbon dioxide systems risk disruption and our food security is endangered.

Pollinators are covered by a wide range of national and international agreements, but there are few specific protection measures in place, the science is still uncertain and the value they bring to us is still not fully factored in. This raises governance and responsibility issues when we think about future policy. Who exactly are the stakeholders and how do they participate in future decisions?

See Harry’s slides here.

Susan Clayton

My life in the future

The final presentation before we broke up into seminar sessions came from Susan Claytonof Future Creation Ltd. She explored “My life in the future” with a vision of how the future turns out to be more positive than expected after greater focus is placed on identifying“preferred futures” (what we want to happen in the future) alongside “plausible futures” (how experts assess the future might evolve). She also felt positive change would arise from stronger emphasis on exploring emerging opportunities (alongside risks)and dramatic improvement in people’s understanding of how to use futures analysis.

In the future, as Susan sees it, projects will focus on the needs of a wider range of organisational stakeholders than now and end users will better appreciate how they might respond to the futures analysis they receive. One reason is that futurists will have improved their capacity to engage stakeholders -for example by producinga range of reports,each targeted ona specific category of end user.

She thought a traffic light system might sometimes be used in reports to help people assess how to respond to future analysis. At one end would lie opportunities and risks that futures specialists judgeto be too uncertain to react to at this stage; at the other end would lie thosethat are sufficiently likely to occur that a response is needed now.

Seminars

The four afternoon sessions were designed to allow delegates to green their own futures work and their own organisations.

Seminar 1 was run by John Reynolds of AMI Consulting and a Wendy Schultz of Infinite Futures. It was intended to help futures analysts to use scenarios to engage stakeholders in environmental issues. On the basis of work they have done for Natural England, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and other clients, they recommend remembering several key points for stakeholder engagement. One is that the public is diverse. You have to involve everyone including the poorest, who can be less visible and articulate than the middle class. You have to listen actively as well. And you must not forget that while public servants use words all the time, most of the rest of the world prefers images. Some produced for the Foresight project Powering Our Lives: Sustainable Energy Management and the Built Environment have been used effectively in public consultation. You could even try theatre or music to get ideas about the future in comprehensible form. Or you could make the tricky concept of the future more real, as John said, by looking back from today. What are the events of 10 or 20 years ago that really shape the environment we inhabit today?

John and Wendy’s slides are available here.

In Seminar 2, Gary Kass, explored ways in which futures are being built into the decision-making structures of Natural England. His theme was Strengthening Delivery in the Face of Change. Better delivery, as Gary sees it, involves being more strategic, if only because change is such a constant, bringing new challenges with it. Nor is this something senior managers do in their offices. Instead it requires organisations to “close the loop” so that they can learn from frontline experience, and calls on them to be outward-looking.

Natural England (NE), Gary said, is doing this by means of a process in which horizon scanning, scenario building and other futures activities raise strategic challenges for high-level groups within the organisation. This in turn leads to quarterly progress reviews which take a forward look at major challenges. There can also be local horizon scanning work within parts of NE. The process draws on insights from science and technology, especially ecology and climate change, as well as social science, politics, economics and land use. It has produced challenges for NE strategy, but also for individuals, in terms of their values and behaviours. It also calls for internal debate and sometimes shows that NE needs external collaboration to get the resources it needs to address its challenges.

The diagram of how this all fits together looks complex but Gary’s explanation was convincing.

You can see Gary’s seminar slides here.

In contrast to Seminar 1, whose emphasis was on using scenarios in work with the public, seminar 3 concentrated on their value in policy itself. Run by Nick Naylor of Futureplan, it centred on a classic 2x2 scenario exercise, based on the scenarios developed for the Foresight project Intelligent Infrastructure Systems. Here the variables were environmental security and insecurity, and a society which was more global or more local. This produces four worlds. In Perpetual Motion, high levels of investment, mobility and trade occur in the context of global governance and collaboration. In Urban Colonies, environmental and social responsibility are fundamental values. In Tribal Trading, nothing has replaced the fossil fuels we use today and world systems are in collapse. And in Good Intentions, attempts are made to tackle climate change on a world scale, in a setting which places high value on personal and public responsibility.

The group used a techniques known as the plausibility matrix to familiarise themselves with the scenarios quickly and explore what they mean for strategy or policy development. The technique uses a series of questions to help participants look closely at the scenarios and describe which they favour. Using the matrix helps groups to reveal any disconnections that might exist between current policy and strategy and future outcomes. This highlights the choices that need to be made to ensure that policies or strategies are fit for the future.

Seminar 4 was run by Steve Wells of a href="http://www.informingchoices.com/">Informing Choices. The theme was Brokering Collaboration. It continued a strand of work on effective collaboration which Steve has been running for the Horizon Scanning Centre.

This work has already shown that futures practitioners can gain from sharing experience and looking together at the issues that futures work presents. The task now is to produce more shared partnership working, with better-defined goals. Steve is pursuing this via the Collaboration Inquiry, a survey of collaboration amongst FAN Club members. There is a Blog on this work, and there is a report on it at the Strategy Exchange web site.

One approach to partnering that has emerged from Steve’s work thus far is a pre-collaboration set of questions designed to test the closeness of each side’s expectations as well as their potential for partnership working. Do the two partners have complementary cultures, objectives and capacity? It is clear that relationship development at an early stage is central to success in partnership working.

The work so far has also looked at the four stages of collaboration which Steve has identified. These are connecting, contracting, collaborating, and then closing, with a proper review of what has happened.

In response to feedback from FAN Club members, the Horizon Scanning Centre is looking to set up working groups of people interested in key aspects such as devolution. It is also planning to run a futures project of its own to test out these ideas.

Much more on this in Steve’s slides a href="../Assets/AssetRedirect.aspx?AST_GUID=a0519dc7-0950-4783-aef9-e5a3b87e4d1d">here.

Neil Spiller and Rachel Armstrong

Living architecture

The final session was intended to send us on our way feeling inspired and challenged. Professor Neil Spiller of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London and Director of VATAR - a cross unit research group and agenda that explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain, its augmentation and symbiosis - began with a tour of many different ways in which architects have taken on the task of designing settlements in which people can live more or less sympathetically with nature.

But his colleague, Dr Rachel Armstrong, went far beyond this remit by taking us from the macro world of architecture to the microstructures of the chemistry lab. She has been playing with chemical processes which might allow us to create buildings without building sites, instead getting chemistry to produce exact, living structures from natural materials. As a first step, existing buildings could have new outer layers which would build like barnacles on a sea wall, perhaps making existing buildings carbon-positive as they suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Making use of these possibilities involves redefining what architects do and what they learn, so that “low-tech biotechnology”, free of complex technology or genetic manipulation, becomes one of their everyday tools. What about bioluminescent organisms to light cities for free at night? Or as a modest starter project, saving Venice from the waves by building a natural limestone reef beneath its buildings?

See Rachel’s presentation here and find out more on her profile page at UCL. You can also read a recent Times article on Rachel’s work here.

Future Meetings

25 November 2009

Achieving Impact in Regional Futures, The Holiday Inn, Belfast

A joint event with the Northern Ireland Executive to explore what makes regional futures distinctive and what the particular ingredients for success are.

8 December 2009

Seminar with Outsights and Dr JonTurney (author of the about-to-be-published Rough Guide to the Future), London.

18 December 2009

Seminar to explore Investing for an Uncertain Future with the Institute for Advanced Studies at Strathclyde University, Glasgow.

25 January 2010

Seminar to explore future perspectives on Africa, London

These events are all now confirmed. All FAN Club members will receive an invitation to each event one month in advance. Places are allocated on a first come, first served basis, so please reply quickly to guarantee attendance.

Government members and co-sponsors’ invitees get priority at the lunchtime events which are limited to 50 places.