Asia Pacific Centre for Social Enterprise (APCSE), Griffith University, Open Lecture Series. Tuesday 19 February, 2013, 6:00 - 7:30pm South Bank Graduate Centre (S07), Room 1.23 South Bank campus, Griffith University Climate change requires a new narrative. Professor Jeremy Williams argues that our primary concern now should not be whether climate change is human-induced, but what we are going to do about it in order that societies might protect themselves from the effects of climate change.

1. Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise
@APCSE
Climate Resilience:
How forward-looking organisations are taking action
to mitigate the impact of climate change
Professor Jeremy B. Williams
Acting Director
Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise
Griffith Business School
South Bank Graduate Centre, 19 February 2013

2. Presentation slides and Twitter back channel
facebook.com/profjeremybwilliams

4. Welcome to the Anthropocene

5. Welcome to the Anthropocene

6. http://www.anthropocene.info/
https://vimeo.com/39048998

11. (World Biocapacity/ World Ecological Footprint) x 365 = Ecological Debt Day
August 22nd

13. Chinese proverb: “Better to give a man a rod than a fish”
Source: Daly, H.E. (2005) ‘Economics in a full world’, Scientific American, September, p. 102.
… the supply of fishing rods is no longer the problem

15. 15 football pitches per day
Image source: nationalgeographic.com
 It is a shortage of trees, not chainsaws, that threatens timber production

17. The Aral Sea once the fourth largest lake in the world, continues to
shrink and is now 10 percent of its original size
• Water itself has become scarce relative to the powerful
pumping technologies used to access it

18. Examples of ecosystem services (Costanza et al 1997)
Ecosystem service Examples
Climate regulation Greenhouse gas regulation, dimethyl sulfide production affecting cloud
formation.
Disturbance regulation Storm protection, flood control, drought recovery and other aspects of
habitat response to environmental variability mainly controlled by
vegetation structure.
Water regulation Provisioning of water for agriculture (e.g. irrigation) or industrial (e.g.
milling) processes or transportation.
Water supply Provision of water by watersheds, reservoirs and aquifers.
Soil formation Weathering of rock and the accumulation of organic material.
Nutrient cycling Nitrogen fixation, nitrogen, phosphorous and other elemental or nutrient
cycles.
Waste treatment Waste treatment, pollution control, and detoxification.
Pollination Provision of pollinators for the reproduction of plant populations.
Biological control Keystone predator control of prey species, reduction of herbivory (plant
eating by insects) by top predators.
Food production Production of fish, game, crops, nuts, fruits etc. by hunting, gathering,
subsistence farming or fishing.
Raw materials Production of lumber, fuel or fodder.
Genetic resources Medicine, products for materials science, genes for resistance to plant
pathogens and crop pests, ornamental species (pets and horticultural
varieties of plants).
Recreation Eco-tourism, sport fishing and other outdoor recreational activities.
Cultural Aesthetic, artistic, education, spiritual and/or scientific values of
ecosystems.

19. Paul Hawken
„We have an economy that tells
us that it is cheaper to destroy
earth in real time rather than
renew, restore, and sustain it.
You can print money to bail out
a bank but you can‟t print life to
bail out a planet.
At present we are stealing the
future, selling it in the present,
and calling it gross domestic
product.‟

24. Source: nationaljournal.tumblr.com

25.  October 2006:
“The greatest
market failure
the world has
ever seen”
Sir Nicholas Stern
 January 2013:

26. IPCC Fourth Assessment Report
February, 2007:
Evidence of Human-
caused Global Warming
is ... “Unequivocal”

29. New colours on the temperature map

30. December 2012 was
the 36th consecutive
December 2012: December and 334th
consecutive month with
global temperature
higher than the 20th
century average.
Source: The National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) of the US Department
of Commerce
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/g
lobal/2012/12

31. 31

32. James L. Powell (author of The Inquisition of Climate Science) reviewed 13,950
peer-reviewed papers published between January 1991 and early November
2012, and only 24 (0.17%) clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause
other than CO2 emissions for observed warming.

34. 2005: CO2 = 379ppm

35. 350.org

36. 36
Source: http://www.21school.ox.ac.uk/news/archive/200702_inaugural_lecture.cfm

37. Dr. Malte Meinshausen

38. Meeting the Cancun Agreement commitment
 International commitment to limit
global warming to 2°C above pre-
industrial levels
 Meinshausen et al calculated that to
reduce the chance of exceeding 2°C
warming to 20%, the global carbon
budget for 2000-2050 is 886Gt CO2
 Deducting emissions from the first
decade of this century, leaves a
budget of 565Gt CO2 for the 40 years
to 2050

39. July 2011
 The carbon budget for the 40 years to
2050 is 565Gt CO2
 All of the proven reserves owned by
private and public companies and
governments are equivalent to
2,795Gt CO2
 Only 20% of the total reserves can be
burned unabated, leaving up to
80% of assets
technically
unburnable
http://www.carbontracker.org/wp-
content/uploads/downloads/2012/08/Unburnable-
Carbon-Full1.pdf

40. At the present rate of consumption, the 2000-2050 carbon budget will be exceeded around 2024

42. Bill McKibben

43. In 1750 (before the growth of fossil fuels) there was 2 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide gas in the
atmosphere. If we extracted it from the air, this the total volume of that gas. (At standard pressure
and 15°C the cube is over 65 miles across.)

44. Since 1750 we have added another 1.5 trillion tons

45. Nearly 1 trillion tons of the carbon dioxide we have added is still in the atmosphere. The rest has
dissolved in the oceans or been absorbed by plants and microbes.

46. Warming the planet by more than 2°C risks run-away climate change, and catastrophe for life on
Earth. If we add any more than half a trillion tons we will exceed 2°C.

47. When we add up the declared reserves of fossil fuel companies, it turns out they are equivalent to
2.8 trillion tons of carbon dioxide. This is fuel we cannot afford to use.

48. “This shows that the fossil fuel companies have five times more carbon in their reserves than
even the most conservative governments think would be safe to burn” – Bill McKibben

51. The reaction to the Meinshausen et al (2009) paper
 Web of Science: 262 citations in scientific articles
 More than 600 citations in Google Scholar
 Top 0.1% of cited environmental papers
 Overall results widely accepted by scientific
community
 Silence from fossil fuel industry

52. Paul Gilding

53. Creating the next industrial revolution
Paul Hawken, Amory and L. Hunter Lovins
propose 4 central strategies of natural
capitalism:
 Radical resource
productivity
 Biomimicry
 Service and flow
economy
 Investing in natural
capital
www.naturalcapitalism.org
See, also by Paul Hawken, (1994) The Ecology of Commerce

54. Nick Robins, Head of the Climate Change Centre at
HSBC Bank, London, on the impact in Europe of a
deflating carbon bubble:
Could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the
London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the
value of oil and gas companies.
“At the moment this risk is not being priced at all”

55. John Hewson
Asset Owners Disclosure
Project (AODP)
“The average pension fund invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in high-carbon intensive
industries and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.
How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best
way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low carbon-intensive industries.”

56. http://www.kpmg.com/AU/en/IssuesAndInsights/ArticlesPublications/Documents/is-natural-capital-a-material-issue.pdf

57. http://www.oxfamamerica.org/press/files/prep-value-chain-climate-resilience.pdf

58. http://www.greenbiz.com/research/report/2013/02/state-green-business-report-2013

61.  „For the purpose of attaining freedom
in the world of nature, man must use
natural science to understand,
conquer and change nature and thus
attain freedom from nature.‟
Speech at the inaugural meeting of the Natural
Science Research Society of the Border Region
(February 5, 1940).
Chairman Mao

62. January 2013: Beijing
air pollution off the scale
Gaia 1-0 China

63. October 2012: Superstorm Sandy
Gaia 1-0 USA

64. Long term prosperity needs resilience not just efficiency
 The key to sustainability lies in
enhancing the resilience of
communities, not in optimising
isolated parts of the system
 Need to think in terms of social-
ecological systems
 Build in redundancy to stay
within known thresholds
Walker & Salt (2006)

65. facebook.com/profjeremybwilliams
au.linkedin.com/in/jembwilliams
@TheGreenMBA
@jeremybwilliams
jeremybwilliams.net