Greening urban growth: green grids of life, not gridlock

Man’s impact on nature comes primarily because of our usage of energy.  Canadian eco-scientist Vaclav Smil  (www.vaclavsmil.com) remarks that in the Roman age, annual energy consumption was 10 giga joules per capita.  The average usage per American today is 34 times higher than the Roman, with a life expectancy three times longer, meaning that we are consuming earth’s resources at a catastrophic rate.  
All life – human, animal or plant – depends on photosynthesis, the conversion of sunlight into energy by plants, without which the diversity of life simply vanishes. On Easter Island, the population began to disappear when the last tree was cut down. Smil estimates that we have been depleting the earth’s biomass at a frightening rate – so greening our buildings and the way we live is an imperative.
Climate change is simply another way of saying that the balance between mankind and plant life has been seriously damaged. Think about it: Our urban lives are happier when we have more plant life around us.
I was not aware that 80 per cent of carbon emissions come from cities; thus, greening cities and making city lifestyles more “low carbon” are critical in ensuring our happiness, health and survival.
The conference – organised by the Growth Dialogue (successor to the Growth Commission, chaired by Nobel laureate Michael Spence) with Think City of Penang – brought together renowned architects, urban planners, city officials and economists from India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia to try to bring an inter-disciplinary approach to the idea of green urban living.
Australian system dynamics thinker John Mathews (www.docenti.luiss.it/mathews) argued that industrial capitalism that has exhausted the finite limits of the planet cannot be allowed to continue. If the current trends in migration, urbanisation and the development of middle-income countries continue, there will be 6 billion middle-class consumers by 2050, compared with 1 billion currently. A new model of consumption and production has to be developed.
Mathews argues that these new models are already being developed by the BRICS countries, led by China and followed closely by India and the others.   He thinks that this new model will be based on a “New Industrial Revolution”, with major transformations in the energy market, the creation of a “Circular Economy” (recycling) and a move from generic finance to targeted eco-finance. He has proposed the issue of “Climate Bonds”, targeted towards financing green projects, with the banks as “gate-keepers” to ensure that green standards are met. This is an idea well worth exploring in getting the financial sector to serve the real estate sector better.
My conclusion from the Dialogue was that everything exists to make the world more green, but we cannot seem to muster the political will to make it happen. For example, the technology already exists for energy sustainability.  The world is awash with savings and liquidity. Civil society has been mobilised for better ecological living. Urban planners and politicians all know that people want to have better living standards. We all want green grids of smart energy, smart agriculture, smart lifestyles, but we end up with brown gridlocks.
This is a systemic problem of collective action traps, not just at local and national levels, but at the global level. Witness the gridlocks in global negotiations in Kyoto, Copenhagen and Doha that are mired in mutual blame.
With the advanced markets blaming emerging markets as the future main sources of carbon emissions, the BRICS countries will have no alternative except to find their own growth models.       
System-wide problems cannot be solved partially. We need a systemic and systematic way of thinking and acting on the interactive and interconnected way the world evolves. Systems thinker Frithof Capra has argued that the “Development process is not purely an economic process. It is also a social, ecological, and ethical process – a multi-dimensional and systemic process”.
For analytical purposes, we can divide development into four (or more) interactive dimensions: business models; ambience and context; policies of government; and the architecture or topology of markets – what I call the BAPA analysis. Through their policies, regulations, taxation and enforcement, governments can impose change. Academics often propose good ideas for change. Civil society often opposes change, but it is through business models that change happens, for good or bad.
Hence, I am a believer that change will not happen until corporate social responsibility adopts the core values of sustainability and humanising the workplace. Today, global corporations like GE and Siemens are already geared to help provide the hardware and software for smart and green cities.   One of the challenges of turning around business models in Asia is that very often, in extractive industries, the most “profitable” businesses are really the most polluting. 
There is a well known “Blue Ocean” strategy for businesses to move out of crowded (less profitable) “Red Seas” into new areas like “Blue Oceans”. Perhaps it is time for business models to move out of the “Brown” (polluting) industries into “Green” fields, because society demands a more sustainable living model.
How this can be done successfully is not up to businesses alone, but also up to governments to set the right policies, academia to come up with the right physical and social technologies, and for consumers to practice green living and lifestyle changes. This is something that deserves more thought and discussion.

Andrew Sheng is president of the Fung Global Institute (www.fungglobalinstitute.org).