Earth Hour: Making all aware of a disaster in slow motion

Straits Times 5 Apr 08;

To mark the first global Earth Hour, about 40 local companies and non-profit organisations dimmed or powered down from 8pm to 9pm last Saturday. Here during the event, Dr Chris Hails, director of international relations of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), switched off his hotel room lights, and walked the bright streets. Shobana Kesava spoke to him

What is the purpose of Earth Hour?

Earth Hour, in terms of absolute energy savings, is a pinprick, but in creating awareness, it's very powerful imagery. What it's doing is raising awareness in terms of our personal behaviour, our profligate use of energy and what we can get by with or get by without.

Do you notice a lot of energy wastage in day-to-day life?

Yes. In Singapore, people spend lots of money using energy, emitting CO2, to cool the room to the point where they want to put a sweater on. It's self-defeating - like trying to losing weight by eating chocolate bars.

Packaging infuriates me. It takes so much more space than the thing I really want. It's completely wasted.

Then there's plastic bags. I went to buy milk from the supermarket across the road from the hotel and the cashier was surprised that I wouldn't take the polythene bag for a carton of milk. The British government is phasing out polythene bags and they are going to charge everyone a surcharge in future for them. Those policies can sensitise people quickly to personal behaviour and reducing waste. Remember, it's just a bag but where does it come from? It comes from oil. Why are we using up a precious commodity for a bag and how much carbon is being put into the atmosphere?

What we are witnessing really is a disaster in slow motion, as we witness the loss of forest, the loss of fishstock and the accelerating impact of climate change.

Is the concern over climate change making your job easier?

Awareness is now really high. The willingness and ability to change is somewhat lower, but it's growing. And climate change is not something that is just going to go away. The challenge we have at the moment is how much can we limit the rise in temperature. We believe the world needs to stay below a two-degree rise in temperature in order to prevent a disaster in the long term, and that will be a real challenge. We really have to push ourselves out of the comfort zone to prevent that.

If we don't solve climate change, other things WWF takes on as a challenge will be affected. It's a little like a doctor treating a sick patient. You have to manage the underlying disease, as well as the symptoms. So we actually have to manage both, and this is the challenge.

We still have to worry about conservation of species, of forests, sustainable use of all kinds of other resources.

And in a sense, you could almost look at climate change as the symptom of a similar kind of disease: a disease of the increasing level of human activity, which has gone beyond what is sustainable.

WWF produces the Living Planet Report - this is our index of the planet's environment.

What we've found is that over the past 30 years, we've lost one-third of the natural health of the planet, while at the same time, the ecological footprint of human activity has gone up 21/2 times.

What needs to be done?

A key concern is to reduce energy use, but it's not going to happen overnight. Every week, China has a coal-fired power station added to its energy portfolio - this is the dirtiest way to produce energy and each one will last 40 years. So there are a lot of things we're stuck with already. What we'd like to see is coal phased out as soon as possible, oil phased out after that, and both replaced by increasing amounts of gas. From a carbon point of view, it's cleaner.

The last thing the world needs is more coal energy. Let's promote sustainable renewable resources, let's look at biofuels, biomass which can come in modest amounts, and have a role to play for a while.

Slowly but surely, coming onstream, will be carbon capture and storage, where you can actually take the carbon out of emissions and store it back in the ground. The technology is there, but making it available on a large scale will come only in 20 years' time.

We need government policies to favour sustainability, we need the commercial sector to be able to get financing to develop sustainable technologies, and we need a the public to demand them.

There is money to be made out of sustainability.

What we need to do is to cut taxes on sustainable technology and tax non-sustainable technologies a lot more.

Do you think Singapore is doing enough?

I think Singapore is doing pretty well, but it could do an awful lot more. Everyone could. Perhaps Singapore has inadvertently done well on some things because of the great public transport system and lower use of cars. The policies to lower vehicle use were made because the decision-makers of the day were very far-sighted, looked at other Asian capitals, looked at the traffic jams and the pollution and the mess vehicles made and said they weren't going to have that happen here.

No one was thinking of climate change when those policies were made 30 years ago, but they are extremely effective today.

Today, we have a system in Singapore that could be transplanted around the world that could greatly reduce vehicle emissions and the need for personal transport.

How can we promote best practices?

WWF invented something called the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in the early 1990s - and we invented a little logo - a little chop you could put on sustainably produced timber. In timber-

producing countries, we encouraged sustainable forest management and in timber-consuming countries, we promote the purchase and use of FSC certified timber. So if you managed your forests sustainably, you qualified for the chop on your timber, and consumers would prefer your timber to non-certified timber.

We've had considerable success and this is now an independent scheme no longer run by WWF. We've been able to do things like persuade the French government that on all government contracts, they are committed to only buying sustainably produced timber. WWF also developed a similar third-party certification scheme for fish called the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC).

Sustainably produced timber is slightly more expensive than unsustainably produced timber, but that could be fixed simply by import duties.

Governments can set a regulatory framework that stops us destroying the planet and creates opportunities for responsible business.

What are some of the things you do in your daily life to do your part for conservation?

I commute to work on a motorcycle, not in a car. I live in a place in Switzerland where public transport is very difficult, so a 125cc motorbike is my preferred form of transport.

I've cut down on my meat consumption and I buy only MSC fish. I heat my house to only 20 deg C, which most people wouldn't consider comfortable, and in the winter I wear an extra sweater.

I separate paper, plastic and glass, and take them to recycling centres in the village.

Within WWF, in the work environment, we have what we call an environmental monitoring system to monitor our environmental statistics. We calculate daily our electricity, heat and oil consumption, our paper use. We have systems inhouse to recycle waste batteries, cardboard, plastic and paper. We have a small committee at work who watch that and plot it and we push the charts all the time.

All WWF travel is offset and is carbon neutral. We reduce our travel as much as possible. Most of our offices have video conference facilities to link them for virtual meetings rather than physical ones.

Do you think the world's climate change woes can be turned around?

I wouldn't have worked for WWF for 20 years unless I was an optimist. We can do a lot and we can do it quickly if we want to.

That's the important thing. It's if we want to.

Sometimes, it has to be pushed on you. How many people have their first heart bypass before they start thinking of exercising and getting in shape? Sometimes, it has to hurt to bring about a change.

And I think it will. When squid - sotong - becomes a luxury commodity in Singapore, people will be thoroughly aware of everything we've been doing to the seas for the past century. I don't at all like to promulgate doom and gloom because we can fix a lot of things.

Species have been brought back from the brink of extinction. The mistakes that were made in the West 100 to 200 years ago do not have to be repeated today.

We have solutions that can now be put in place to benefit governments, business and individuals, and we want to see more action.