By Niall Dunne, Chief Sustainability Officer, BT

 On July 4^th 2011 while we Americans were celebrating Independence, the British were still working hard and Niall Dunne joined BT as our new chief sustainability officer to lead on climate change, and sustainable development and strategy.  Niall had spent the past decade leading sustainability practices in Saatchi & Saatchi and Accenture, and in building their credentials and reputation in the sustainability area. He is already having a marked impact in BT.   In this blog post he shares his perspective on the upcoming UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP 17.

People always make better decisions when they understand the relationship between the cause and effect of their actions. Humanity’s evolutionary story to date has largely been one of better decisions and innovation enabled through a clearer understanding of our environmental constraints and opportunities.  However, if we want our evolution to continue to be a success story we need to fundamentally transform the dynamics of supply and demand globally and create systems that will work and scale for a planet projected, by the UN, to have 10 billion human inhabitants by 2050.

One of the major issues with globalization is that its complexity means that our once symbiotic relationship with the environment has become opaque; we can no longer see the implications of our every day decisions, resulting in humanity and the environment being at odds with each other.

However, one of the major benefits of the globalisation mind-set is the interconnectedness that it has fuelled. Never before have we been as connected to our global neighbours; never before have we been so socially attuned to the needs and aspirations of others or so empowered to reach out to them.

Our communication technology is the driving force behind this shift and it’s this technology that has the power to deliver the transparency needed to restore the clarity required for better decision making.

If we are to evolve still further and realize our greatest potential, we must embrace technology’s ability to restore transparency to the every day lives of people, in both the developed and developing worlds.

Crucially, we must make our consumption behaviours transparent to provenance and impacts.  As affluence and consumption grow globally, we must urgently move away from the excessive resource demands of the last one hundred years to a much more collaborative and conscientious form of consumption.

The opportunity for business is to help customers manage the complexity of purchasing and lifestyle decisions in a way that makes acting on their values easy.

Similarly, on the supply side we must again embrace technology’s ability to move us away from “supply chains” to “supply loops”. Here again transparency and traceability are key allies in ensuring we optimize our global supply networks & begin to drive efficiency & eradicate waste.

To date, the greater focus of efforts via the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has been on regulation and achieving political consensus to influence supply-side impacts. Tackling demand-side impacts from consumption and accelerating innovation has, for the most part, been sidelined.  We need an holistic approach that is transparent across national and international systems of production and consumption, which gives clear line of sight to the resources we need to manage for the benefit of all nations and all ecosystems.

This needs innovation – of technologies and systems change – to influence demand-side impacts through efficient solutions that can scale to help our rapidly increasing population cope with resource constraints and the implications of climate change.  We welcome initiatives from the UNFCCC to create open innovation policy frameworks to incentivize and accelerate collaboration to solve common climate-change challenges.  They should facilitate investment to develop, share, and scale relevant intellectual property.

Whilst the frameworks are needed to enable rapid leap-frogging to more sustainable technologies and to accelerate change where possible, we should also seek to leverage those approaches that have already been proven to drive transparency.  For example energy labelling of white goods, such as fridges and washing machines, using a simple A-G rating system in the UK, or the Energy Star rating in the US, has driven strong consumer demand for more energy efficient appliances.

There is phenomenal potential for digital technology to activate the kind of transparent labelling and create social currency that could be utilised to celebrate a more conscientious and collaborative energy efficient lifestyle, both in the developed and developing world.

People already use smart and intuitive devices to enable new ways of doing things in their daily lives. Through digital technologies we know far more about the people we share this small planet with than ever before.  The opportunities to harness digital technologies to enable more sustainable lifestyles are everywhere; in our energy, transportation, and food systems, in our built environment, between machines and between individuals.  We need to support these innovations and the collaborative and transparent behaviours that bring out the best of in people; that help them connect to one another and that help businesses, governments and individuals aspire to a ‘one planet lifestyle’ for all.

Collaboration, innovation and transparency are central in successfully tackling the consumption challenge driving climate change and the UNFCCC’s latest report COP17 needs to take crucial steps in these areas to accelerate positive changes.