Presentation to senior Vietnamese public servants, Griffith University, Brisbane, 18 October 2013

1. Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise
Sustainable Futures:
What should organisations in Vietnam be doing to
mitigate the impact of climate change?
Professor Jeremy B. Williams
Acting Director
Asia Pacific Centre for Sustainable Enterprise
Griffith Business School

3. Welcome to the Anthropocene

4. Welcome to the Anthropocene

7. 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

9. 15 football pitches per day
Image source: nationalgeographic.com
 It is a shortage of trees, not chainsaws, that threatens timber production

11. 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

12. January 2013: Beijing
air pollution off the scale

13. 13
Image source: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

14. Paul Hawken
„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.‟

15. Good or bad
for GDP?

22. Source: nationaljournal.tumblr.com

23. 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.

26. IPCC Fifth Assessment Report

30. 30
Source: http://www.21school.ox.ac.uk/news/archive/200702_inaugural_lecture.cfm

31. 1928
2004
Upsala Glacier, Argentina
31

32. Blomstrandbreen Glacier, Norway
1922

33. Blomstrandbreen Glacier, Norway
2002

34. The Imja Glacier, Himalayas

35. The Imja Glacier, Himalayas

37. New colours on the temperature map
January 2013

38. October 2012: Superstorm Sandy

40. Southeastern China, February 2011
Anhui Province, China, August 2006

41. 41
Floods in Southern China, June 2011,
550,000 left homeless

42.  1 metre sea level rise
will inundate more
than 15 percent of
Bangladesh, displacing
more than 13 million
people

48. http://co2now.org/

52. Dr. Malte Meinshausen

53. Meeting the Cancun Agreement commitment
 International commitment to limit
global warming to 2°C above preindustrial 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

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

55. 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.)

56. Since 1750 we have added another 1.5 trillion tons

57. 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.

58. 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.

59. 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.

60. “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

61. 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/wpcontent/uploads/downloads/2012/08/UnburnableCarbon-Full1.pdf

63. 63
“The Virgin Earth Challenge”
… USD25 million prize if you can develop “a commercially viable design which
results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to
contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate”.

64. 64
Marine cloud whitening?

65. 65
This design does not qualify apparently …

66. Going about our business naturally
 Radical resource
productivity
 Biomimicry
 Investing in natural capital
 Service and flow economy
www.naturalcapitalism.org

67. Radical resource productivity
 Using resources more efficiently in ways that can already be
achieved; e.g. process redesign (disembodied technical
change) or energy efficient buildings, passive solar heating.

68. Research biomimicry
Spider silk
Abalone shell
Stenocara beetle

69. Invest in natural capital

71. The sustainable development
journey

72. H.E. Mr. Nguyen Cam Tu, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry & Trade

79. Nguyen Minh Quang,
Minister of Natural
Resources and
Environment




reduce poverty
ensure gender equality and social welfare
protect natural resources; and
raise public awareness of climate change adaptation

82.  „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

84. 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 socialecological systems
 Build in redundancy to stay
within known thresholds
Walker & Salt (2006)

85. @TheGreenMBA
@jeremybwilliams
profjeremybwilliams