Cheong Suk-Wai Straits Times 12 Apr 11;
AS A boy, Mr James Leape would walk through America's Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks with his grandfather, who was a naturalist and would point this and that bird out to him.
Mr Leape, 55, recalls: 'I grew up wanting to be a park ranger - and then I discovered that I really liked arguing about conservation, so I went to law school!'
Harvard Law School, to be precise, after which he practised as an environmental lawyer for some years, counting among his many clients the United Nations Environment Programme.
Then, in 1989, he made good on his childhood dream by joining the United States office of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The WWF, which celebrates its 50th anniversary later this month, is one of the world's largest environmental organisations. Mr Leape directed WWF US' global conservation programmes for more than 10 years. In 2005, he was appointed director-general of WWF International, which is the WWF's global secretariat, coordinating the efforts of its more than 90 offices in 40 countries - including Singapore, where it is known as the World Wide Fund For Nature. It works with non-governmental bodies on 1,300 conservation projects, including the sustainable harvesting of palm oil and the protection of coral reefs.
In town for work last month, he told me why the WWF isn't just about saving endangered pandas any more:
What are some of your most pressing challenges in Asia today?
A big-time issue is reducing carbon emissions in Indonesia, whose burning forests are a major source of air pollution and climate change. We are also looking at making the region's fisheries sustainable and trying to transform markets, which means looking at the commodities that drive biodiversity in a big way, such as palm oil. We've amazing traction with that.
How so?
Well, eight years ago, we helped create the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. It now has more than 370 members, among which are 40 per cent of the world's palm oil producers. But the roundtable's members are also buyers and civil society groups like us.
This roundtable has developed standards for sustainable palm oil, which means eliminating deforestation from our supply chain. Oil palms should be grown only on land that is already set aside for agriculture. In the last two years, it's become possible for producers to get certified under those standards, sending sustainable palm oil production from 0 per cent to 6.5 per cent.
But isn't partnering such businesses like sleeping with the Devil?
What is sleeping with the Devil?
Partnering people with vested interests in staying alive.
This isn't about shutting down industries. This is about how we move industries on to a sustainable future.
But isn't there a fine line between that and encouraging industrialists to continue overproducing?
Well, yeah, but you've got a growing global population and growing demands, right? So yes, we have to reduce consumption, but the world needs to produce vegetable oil and palm oil production is a pretty efficient way to do that. So let's do it off lands that are already available for agriculture.
We also have a consumer goods forum made up of 400 companies and consumer groups, whose total revenues are US$2.8 trillion (S$3.5 trillion). So that's quite a lot of them, and they announced at the 2010 climate talks in Cancun, Mexico that they were committing themselves to zero nett deforestation by 2020. And a group of 20 companies within that, led by Mr Paul Polman of (Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant) Unilever, said they were committed to sourcing only for palm oil, soya beans, beef, timber and so on that have been certified as sustainable either by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the Marine Stewardship Council or the Forest Stewardship Council (all of which WWF International co-founded).
But won't producers pass their certification costs on to consumers?
First, let's not accept the premise that this needs to be a lot more expensive than it is. Second, we need to make sure that buyers are willing to pay what it takes for palm oil to be sustainable. There is in fact demand for this product that is produced to set standards. And third, it's important that we work from all sides (to move sustainability along); we're working with investors to support this shift.
You're also trying to shift consumers towards saving energy with your yearly Earth Hour campaign. But isn't it just a fad?
The fad concern is a concern that I had in 2007 when we started Earth Hour, and again in 2008, 2009 and 2010. But now it's 2011, and Earth Hour gets bigger every year. Last year, we had 128 countries taking part; the words 'Earth Hour' were entered into Google 800 times every second for the whole Earth Hour day. So now, the question is: How does this translate into their lives? Of course, there's no silver bullet. But if you put Earth Hour next to what some companies are doing, then people can see that, okay, bigger changes are happening. And when they go to a store, they have choices that they didn't have. They can actually be part of a solution that simply wasn't possible just five years ago. Then when you see them moving, that changes the politics.
All well and good, but aren't these efforts being roundly cancelled out by our excessive consumption?
The level of carbon in the atmosphere continues to go up. You have increasing water scarcity. We continue to lose forests at an astonishing rate. Several leading marine scientists in the US have predicted that all of the world's commercial fisheries would be gone by the middle of the century if the rate of current consumption continues. So the trend lines are going badly in the wrong direction. What I've now been talking about are efforts that actually have the promise of beginning to turn those around. The challenge for all of us is to deliver on that promise, by eating less meat so our diet is more easily sustained; by finding myriad ways to get more out of the land that we use; by reducing waste; and, fundamentally, by shifting the world to renewable energy.
suk@sph.com.sg
Wasteful living: One Earth isn't enough
SOFT-SPOKEN, down-to-earth and droll, lawyer James Leape says that saving the planet is simply about living mindfully:
The future of humanity
'Someone said to me, 'People talk about saving the planet but the planet's going to be just fine, thank you.' But humanity will not do so well and there are many species we will take with us if we don't get onto a better track.'
Singapore
'It's a natural place for us to have an office because it's such an important hub in a region of great and growing importance. We gather once a year in the Asia-Pacific and we gather here.'
His favourite factoid
'We have to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we produced in the last 8,000 years.'
How wasteful people are today
'If everyone on Earth lived as the average American does, we would need five planets. And the average European and average Singaporean live in a way that would require three planets to support.'
