Involve is arguing that governments can’t solve complex global challenges on their own, but instead need to unleash the power and creativity of an engaged public. And they offer some excellent tools for doing so – giving power back to people through structured dialogue. Inspiring stuff.

People starting education now will be retiring in 2065 – we are educating them for a future we cannot see, predict or understand. We need to rethink the fundamental principles for educating our children. Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future – a future we may not see…our job is to help them make something of it!

Sir Ken Robinson, TED, June 2006

The problem

In recent years there have been severe pressures on the school system in the UK to do more and more:

• The drive for STEM (Science, technology, engineering and maths) skills
• Learning about climate change
• A duty to promote community cohesion
• Developing young citizens

Until recently, schools have been expected to meet these challenges, and many more. But they can’t do it all – on the one hand the National College calls for system leadership amongst school leaders, extending out to be a leader of the whole community. On the other hand rightly there has been a backlash against a perception that schools are being drawn away from their core purpose of teaching and learning.

The new government’s response seems to be to return to a ‘traditional’ core of subjects. Whilst this might be good in narrow educational terms, it ignores the realities and challenges of the world today, and so raises the risks of us going medieval.

An alternative solution: education as resilience

A view of education as resilience is a view that education offers us the capabilities to respond to any of these pressures, as well as responding to new pressures that we know will arise in the 21^st century. Though we can be confident that these pressures will arise, we can’t yet predict what they will be. So as well as teaching specific knowledge, we need to teach general tools for adaptability and responsiveness.

At the heart of this general toolbox is critical thinking. Critical thinking allows us to respond effectively to a fast-changing world and manage the information overload that the internet has created. And in this way critical thinking offers a new conception of what it means to be free in the 21^st century. Critical thinking equates to freedom from the tyranny of having your opinions decided for you by the newspaper you read, or the adverts next to your email account. It allows you to reflect on your own views, values and aspirations, bringing greater individual autonomy.

So critical thinking offers personal freedom. But just as importantly, a nation of critical thinkers offers social resilience against the shocks of the 21^st century. Because we know these shocks are coming. But they don’t need to derail our society, like Hurricane Katrina did in New Orleans.

Our response to shocks like Katrina depends a great deal on how we mentally frame these events. As an example, take this quote from FT enterprise editor Jonathan Guthrie:

What always strikes me as a business journalist visiting a city like Newcastle, a manifest loser in economic terms, is how blithely unworried the ordinary inhabitants are about it. They have robust civic institutions, strong local pride and a well-documented capacity to throw a party. According to one survey on contentment published a few years ago, the most miserable Britons were not impecunious Geordies but the prosperous inhabitants of the south east. The imputed causes were commuting and the insecurity that daily exposure to extremes of wealth and poverty can occasion. Relative economic underperformance matters a lot in the boardroom of the regional development agency. Less so in the pub, football stadium or mosque.

Jonathan’s point is that our response to relative wealth or poverty is not set – it depends a great deal on how we frame the experience of our daily lives, and what we worry about.

The power of critical thinking is that it gives us control over this framing process. Being able to reflect on, and think critically about how we respond to, say, climate-related disasters can make the difference between having New Orleans-style breakdowns in society at ever-increasing frequencies, or recognising and accepting that more destructive environmental shocks are now an inevitable part of our lives, and ensuring that our collective response to these shocks brings our communities together, rather than tearing them apart. In other words, education in the form of critical thinking offers us a route to social resilience.

At their most apocalyptic, some commentators argue that we risk descending into a new dark age over the next few centuries. This may be hyperbole, but it is nevertheless essential that we work today to develop the critical thinking tools that will help us to continue to make social progress in the coming century, which looks to be at least as turbulent as the last one.

After a very busy year with Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development I needed a good break. I’m now working as Policy and Research Manager at an education charity, DEA, and have updated the blog to reflect this.

More soon.

Be very, very careful what you put into that head because you will never, ever get it out.

So said Cardinal Wolsey sometime in the 16th century. I was reminded of his comment this morning listening to Liz Coleman, Head of Bennington College in the USA, giving one of the awesome series of TED lectures.

Liz made an impassioned plea to develop a new vision of our education system, a subject that is close to my heart because I believe that sustainable education is one of the best opportunities to engender social resilience. She summarised her argument as:

When the impulse is to change the world, the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment.

Her solution?

Enhancing the public good becomes a primary objective [of education]…Our ways of approaching agency and authority turn inside out, to reflect the reality that no-one has the answers to the challenges facing citizens in this century, and everyone has the responsibility for trying and participating in finding them…When the design [of a revitalised education system] emerged it was surprisingly simple and straightforward. The idea is to make the political and social challenges themselves, from health and education to the uses of force, the organisers of the curriculum…and the point is not to treat these topics as topics of study but as frameworks of action.

A powerful argument (even more so if you watch the video). But take heed of Cardinal Wolsey’s pearl of wisdom. A revitalised education should not, cannot attempt to give students the answers to the major political and social challenges we face. It cannot tell students what to think. Instead it must tell them how to think, giving them the critical analysis, empathy and ability to deal with uncertainty that will allow them to make up their own minds about these challenges (The RSA’s Opening Minds curriculum framework is a great example of this).

So Liz, by all means lets develop a new vision of education fit for the 21st century. But not to make it a tool for indoctrination. We have had enough of that already. We need to develop an education system that creates a generation resistant to indoctrination, and empowered to find collective solutions to meet the challenges we face this century. That would be true social resilience.

After discussing the bank’s efforts to increase sustainability within the current economic model, we eventually came to a broad agreement that finance for decarbonisation cannot be ramped up fast enough to combat climate change unless we move away from a ‘profit-at-all-costs’ economic paradigm. Something to chew on…

More interesting for this blog, though, was our discussion of the role of carbon markets. We initially agreed that a carbon market is essential to leverage finance for low-carbon development to enhance social resilience. However, a carbon market will only provide this function if there is a credible carbon price i.e. one that will not fluctuate wildly, creating an uncertain investment environment.

My contention is that speculation over the carbon price undermines that credibility, because it moves the price away from the market fundamentals, often on the basis of herd behaviour rather than market intelligence. This is what happened in the housing market in previous years, and it reduces the resilience of the economy.

I therefore put it to the bank’s representative that speculation in carbon markets must be curbed in order to make the markets effective. He disagreed, arguing that without speculation the market would die. But in so doing he presented this argument as a false dichotomy; there is a case for curbing speculation in markets, rather than eliminating it altogether. Such speculation may be curbed through a tax equivalent to a Tobin tax on carbon transactions. This would bring stability to the carbon markets, providing a more certain investment environment for low-carbon technologies.

The fact that, despite what we’ve learnt about dysfunctional markets in the past year or two, the Head of Environmental Sustainability at one of the major investment banks is still arguing within the old, discredited economic paradigm, is somewhat depressing. Broadly characterised, he provided an honest and accurate assessment of how much can be achieved within the current, profit-led market system.

But this isn’t going to be enough to keep the risk of going medieval to an acceptable level. Logically, therefore, we need to find an alternative market system. More on one of the alternatives soon…

But at the same time, the financial crash has shown us how a lack of government oversight of our economic decisions (such as the conditions under which we can buy a mortgage) has left us with dangerously little economic resilience. Better oversight of social and environmental decisions is badly needed if we are to prevent an ecological crash even deeper than the financial crash. Is there a way around this apparent contradiction?

I had the opportunity to discuss these issues with Martin Sandbu, one of the FT’s leader writers, a week or so ago. We agreed on many issues, although Martin finished our discussion on a note of caution:

It is very hard to find the balance between protecting people from undue manipulation and stepping over the line into thinking that we can tell people what to like.

I was reminded of Martin’s comment during a seminar on behavioural economics from Henry Leverson-Gower from GHK consulting this week. Henry offered us all sorts of ways in which it is possible to change people’s behaviour, ranging from financial incentives, through changing habits and cognition, to social norms.

This sounds a bit Orwellian. Except that this is exactly what happens to us already, through supposedly ‘free’ markets. Without government protection, our preferences, habits, norms and rules of thumb are framed and changed by what we read, see and hear. And if what we read, see and hear is being produced by profit-seeking economic agents whose interests conflict with our need for social resilience, we are manipulated to act unsustainably. In this way our largely unprotected exposure to marketing messages increases the risk that the grand downturn will cause us to go medieval.

All this leaves a clear role for governments. They must reduce the ability of others to influence our decisions, rather than trying to influence our decisions themselves. For example, Martin and I agreed that there is a role for quite strict curbs on TV advertising, in light of what we know about the malleability of consumer preferences. But we are on dangerous territory when the government embarks on TV advertising themselves.

With the government protecting us from outside interference we can then engage as citizens in a genuinely free discussion over how to ensure that we can meet the challenges of the 21st century in a way that protects us from the shocks we know are coming, and allows people around the globe to prosper in low carbon world.

JP, as he’s affectionately known within Forum for the Future, was feeling a little pessimistic. He succumbed somewhat to the Jim Lovelock line that its too late to stop climate change, that there’s nothing we can do and that we need to prepare to go medieval. Well, he didn’t go quite that far, but you know what I mean.

It seemed a good opportunity to explore this idea of social resilience. So I asked him to assume that it IS too late – what should we do to make the grand downturn as pleasant as possible?

His response is that we must, above all, focus on the health of our democracy in order to build social resilience. He singled out for criticism the security-related mechanisms that are currently being used to stifle environmental dissent – the government’s attempts to overturn the Greenpeace Kingsnorth decision; the police infiltration of protest groups; the continuing restrictions on the right to protest peacefully. JP is adamant that we must be outspoken in our criticism of these attacks on our democratic freedoms.

Yet it is easy to see why the Government and the police are so nervous about protesters – they would be perfect cover for a terrorist attack. No matter that such a terrorist attack is incredibly unlikely, the Government and the police are not willing to take the risk. And this is largely because we, as citizens, are unwilling to contemplate the risk that we, or someone we know, might be killed in a terrorist attack.

The problem is that, in refusing to contemplate this risk, we expose ourselves to a far higher risk. Specifically, we expose ourselves to the risk that restrictions on our right to protest will contribute to a weakening of our democratic system such that when the grand downturn comes, we will be left without the social resilience to ride that downturn peacefully.

The upshot of all of this is that to enhance our social resilience we need to be more sensible about the way we view risks. We need to accept that we live in an increasingly risky society and that we cannot just wrap ourselves in cotton wool to protect ourselves on all sides. Politicians must face up to the risk of catastrophic climate change and resulting social breakdown. In this light, strengthening democracy and thereby enhancing social resilience by encouraging rather than stifling peaceful protest actually reduces the balance of risk, despite slightly raising our exposure to terrorism.

But to do this politicians need the support of us as citizens. We need to move away from a politics where any form of risk to us or those we love is unacceptable. If we are to build social resilience we need a new public acceptance of risk.

The voluntary carbon offset market doubled in size between 2007 and 2008 to $750m, according to a report (PDF) from New Carbon Finance and Ecosystems Marketplace, confirms that 123 million tonnes of carbon credits were bought and sold last year around the world. This is more than double the 2007 figures, of 65 million tonnes, worth $331 million. The average price for voluntary offset credits rose 20% to $7.34/tCO2 equivalent.

This is good news, of sorts. But the voluntary market is by far the smallest part of the carbon markets; in contrast the EU emissions trading scheme was worth $95bn in 2008. And, as the FT has previously reported, the voluntary market is the least well regulated, with offsets of very variable quality being sold in the past.

However quality does appear to be improving – New Carbon Finance and Ecosystem Marketplace emphasise that “more than 96% of offset credits were verified to a thirdparty standard in 2008.”

Related links:

Beware the carbon offsetting cowboys (FT, 25/04/07)
Guide to good carbon offsetting (FT, 25/04/07)

The Government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has been coming to the defence of recycling recently, addressing three key myths that have been circulating in the press.

Myth 1: Collecting and transporting recycling is bad for the environment as it causes CO2 emissions.

According to Dr Liz Goodwin, WRAP’s chief executive, this greatly overstates the emissions associated with transportation. “The impact of collecting and transporting is a tiny fraction of CO2 emissions, equivalent to 0.04 tonnes per tonne of recycled material.”

Dr Goodwin adds: “Current levels of recycling in the UK save 18 million tonnes of CO2 per year. This is equivalent to flying the population of Northern Ireland to Australia and back twice.”

Myth 2: Recycling is a waste of time – there are better alternatives such as burning waste.

This is not true either, apparently. For all combustible materials except wood, more energy is saved by recycling than is recovered by incineration. WRAP’s figures show that burning plastic recovers between 5 and 12 MJ energy, compared to 100MJ required to make the plastic in the first place, and 12-20 MJ saved by recycling the plastic. For paper and card, the energy saved by recycling is double that recovered by incineration.

Dr Goodwin comments: “There is a role for energy-from-waste, but it should not be the starting point – we should be trying to recycle as much as we can before burning.”

Myth 3: There is no benefit to recycling if it goes abroad

Again, the transport of recycling is relatively unimportant here, according to WRAP. “The emissions caused by transporting materials amounts to less than a third of the emissions saved” even if the material is sent to China.

For example, Craig Simmons of Best Foot Forward, a carbon footprinting consultancy, highlights that recycling a tonne of glass saves over 300kg of CO2, and that “the difference between exporting to Europe or the Far East is only 30kgCO2/tonne”, or a tenth of the overall carbon saving.

So recycling makes carbon sense, then. But in discussing these figures, WRAP also dispelled a further myth:

Myth 4: Recycling reduces the UK’s carbon emissions.

It doesn’t, unfortunately, because of the system of national carbon accounts that countries currently use to calculate their emissions.

To illustrate this point, Dr Goodwin uses the example of a tonne of aluminium, manufactured in South America. Using virgin materials releases 11 tonnes of CO2 in the manufacturing process, whereas recycling the aluminium only releases two tonnes. That’s a nine tonne saving for a tonne of aluminium. “The problem is that the CO2 accounting system is national not global, so that the nine tonnes are orphaned tonnes.”

The concept of ‘orphaned tonnes’ needs a bit of explaining. The UK’s emissions will actually rise by two tonnes if the aluminium is recycled domestically, and the primary producer of aluminium (Brazil, say) will not record an emissions reduction because they have not produced the recycled aluminium at all. So the nine tonnes of saved CO2 will be ‘orphaned’, not counting towards any country’s carbon reduction targets.

(It must be noted, however, that Brazil’s emissions will be 11 tonnes lower than if the aluminium had not been recycled because, presumably, the UK will buy a tonne less aluminium from Brazilian producers.)

All this means that, from the UK’s perspective, recycling contributes little to carbon reduction targets, because the UK imports so much of its raw materials. Perhaps the plight of orphaned tonnes will twinge policymakers’ heartstrings and lead to a reform of the carbon accounting systems to remove such anomalies?

As reported in the FT over the weekend, the price of waste in the UK has surged this year. Good news for recycling, but what about the energy from waste (EfW) sector?

Higher prices for recyclable materials should reduce the volume of waste that is incinerated. On the other hand the higher value of specific materials is likely to encourage the more effective sorting of waste, which in turn will encourage more efficient EfW technologies such as anaerobic digestion to flourish.

Creating energy from waste remains controversial, because the energy is usually extracted by incineration. Environmental groups tend to oppose incineration because of the harmful dioxins that are emitted into the atmosphere during combustion, as well as the resulting fly ash, which in some cases qualifies as hazardous waste.

An alternative EfW technology is anaerobic digestion of food and other organic wastes, from which it is estimated that 1.45 TWh electricity could be generated in the UK. Anaerobic digestion avoids some of the environmental problems associated with incineration.

However, anaerobic digestion requires that biodegradeable waste is separated from other wastes (for example through household food collections) – a mixed bag of rubbish cannot be treated using this technology.

Higher prices for recyclable materials encourages the separation of waste, particularly because high quality recovered material (with few impurities) commands a price premium. In turn this means the barriers to anaerobic digestion are reduced, making it a relatively more attractive EfW technology in comparison to incineration.

Based on this analysis, the increase in prices for recyclable materials sends the right market signals. Because some types of waste have a high economic value it encourages the sorting of waste. This allows recyclable materials to be recycled, and biodegradeable materials to undergo anaerobic digestion. A much lower volume of residual wastes can then be either incinerated or sent to landfill.