Plan for the Planet

A Business Plan for a Sustainable World

Ian Chambers, John Humble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351910996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Sustainable Agriculture
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The world struggles with increasing threats to global sustainability, caused by population growth, overuse of fresh water resources, depletion of biodiversity, and reliance on non-renewable energy sources. There is an urgent need for an overall plan to address these challenges in a coordinated and effective manner. Whether in government, business, community or as an individual, we need to begin acting a lot smarter, faster and more collaboratively if we are going to avert the potential devastating impacts on this planet. Plan for the Planet outlines a co-ordinated approach to tackling the global challenges we face which can be implemented at every level. Using proven business management wisdom and principles, this book provides perhaps the most comprehensive and robust framework within which business, government and the community can work together to build a sustainable world. Whether you want to understand how to prepare your organisation and yourself to deal successfully with the global challenges, or seize the opportunities which are fast developing with the emergence of the sustainability revolution, you will benefit from reading this timely book.

Chapter 1
Why We Need a Plan for the Planet

‘Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail.’

Winston Churchill

‘The evidence is compelling: we need to redesign our social and economic policies before we wreck the planet. At stake is humankind’s one shot at a permanent bright future.’

Edward O. Wilson

‘If a visitor were to arrive from outer space and looked at planet earth, their immediate request would be to ask to see the manager.’

William S. Burroughs

Let us just imagine for a moment that we did receive a visitor from the galaxies and after a brief look at the state of our planet, they did ask to see the manager! What would our response be? We could imagine taking them to one of our global organisations such as the United Nations. Here we would probably highlight the major advances our civilisation has made over the last 10,000 years – from hunter gatherers, to the wonders of modern science, medicine, communications, technology and global management.

However, our visitor would probably not be totally satisfied with this overview and we could expect our visitor to ask a few telling questions about what is not working so well on Planet Earth. Questions about climate change, energy resources, food and water, global health, unsustainable population growth and the well-being of other species on the planet.

At this point we would probably have to admit that we as a human race are facing some of the most challenging issues we have encountered as a civilisation – all converging at the same time and with many needing to be addressed in the next decade if we are to be successful in dealing with them.

We could imagine our visitor nodding understandingly and explaining that every planet faces challenges as it progresses. However the successful planets develop an overall plan on how to address the issues in a coordinated way, and then work together to tackle them. At this point we could anticipate what the next question will be. Our interplanetary visitor would probably ask to see our overall plan. To see how we are dealing with the challenges we are facing. How are we coordinating our efforts on a global scale? How are we working together to tackle these issues?

At this point we could imagine an embarrassed silence as we have to admit that we have no overall global plan to address all of these issues. In fact, we would have to admit that we are struggling to develop and agree a plan on even one issue such as climate change.

Now the realisation of the predicament we are in as a human race hits us. The human race and Planet Earth are facing some of the most challenging issues in the history of our civilisation, and yet we have no overall, coordinated global plan on how to deal with them.

This is even more surprising when we consider that we already know that an organisation or business which is facing major challenges will be much more successful if it has a plan of attack that everybody can get behind and implement. And we have the frameworks, skills and technologies required to build and successfully implement these plans through our business management capabilities We even have examples where plans have been developed and successfully implemented to deal with global crises – such as the Marshall Plan following the Second World War – and more recently the coordinated action taken on the global financial crisis. And yet we have not translated these capabilities into an overall global plan for our planet to address the much larger crisis we face.

If this was a business, then our interplanetary visitor would probably suggest politely that we ‘change the management’ and appoint a new management team to quickly develop and implement a plan of attack to address these global challenges.

However, at this point our second predicament hits us. The reality is that there are no other managers to appoint – we are ‘the management team’. Everyday, in everything we do, we all manage a part of the ‘business’ called Planet Earth. This may be in our household, our business, in our community, in the organisations in which we work, or in government. And how we manage these parts of the business everyday impacts on Planet Earth. Every one of us is everyday either making matters worse, or making things better. There are no bystanders. And there is no one else to address these issues. The reality is that it is up to each of us to make a difference in the areas we can impact.

However, we know from the basics of business and organisational management, that to be most effective, this can be most successfully achieved when done in a coordinated way. In fact, we don’t need a degree in business and organisational management to know this. It is common sense. If we are going on a holiday, if we are moving house, we put a plan together. We don’t just sit around and hope that it will happen, because if we do this, we know that it probably won’t happen.

Yet, if we look at the challenges that we are facing on Planet Earth, we have to admit we have no overall plan that can enable us to tackle them in an effective and coordinated way. We are in danger of hoping things will sort themselves out, because it is unclear what we can do, and whether it will actually make a difference. In other areas, we have taken very positive actions, made developments and created best practices, but on a global scale we are lacking overall coordination. We have to admit we are simply not working effectively together to tackle and address the global challenges we are facing. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly aware of the extremely limited timeframes in which we have to act.

The time for just talking is therefore over. The time for coordinated action is now. We need to work together on a global as well as local basis to an overall plan. A plan that can be implemented at national, business, community and individual levels.

Is it possible to build and implement such a plan? We believe so, and have developed a Plan for the Planet as a starting point for exactly this. To demonstrate that using global business management principles we can build a plan to achieve a sustainable world.

This Plan for the Planet is by no means a perfect plan. No plan ever is. However, it is intended as a starting point, to provide a framework which others can evolve, develop and adapt. The intention is to provide the impetus to ‘kick start’ the actions and the changes that we need to make if we are to succeed in building a sustainable world.

So what exactly are the challenges we must address in achieving this sustainable world? A key step in moving forward is understanding these, and it is therefore worthwhile at this point to take a few minutes to look at the changes that are taking place on Planet Earth right at the moment. And why we urgently need a Plan for the Planet to successfully address these. We can quickly get a sense of these by looking at the changes that will take place even over the next hour, the time it takes you to read a few chapters of this book.

• Population: Within this hour the population on Planet Earth will have increased by more than 9,000 people. This translates into an increase of an additional 220,000 people every day – and over 80 million more people every year!¹ Over the last 70 years, less than one average lifetime, the human race has more than trebled from 2 billion to over 7.0 billion people.
• Climate Change: Within this hour over 1 million extra tonnes of CO₂ will have been released into the atmosphere – translating into over 10 billion tons per year.² The increasing evidence is that this is contributing significantly to the damaging greenhouse effect and therefore the potential for further global warming. Global warming in turn has been linked to changes in weather patterns, increasing droughts and storms, and reduced crop yields. Events which we have already been observing over the last decade.
• Energy: Within this hour an additional 3.5 million barrels of oil will have been used. This means we continue to consume more than 30 billion barrels a year.³ Yet we are aware that at least half of the easily accessible oil reserves may have already been consumed. This is contributing to increasing uncertainty about long-term production capabilities. It has also been estimated that Planet Earth without fossil fuels could only support 2 billion people, due to the importance they play in agriculture and food production, if we are not able to develop energy alternatives at a parallel rate.
• Water and food: Within this hour over 1 billion people will not have had enough food to eat or access to safe drinking water.⁴ Our unreplenishable underground aquifers across all continents are diminishing at an alarming rate, and water prioritisation conflicts are increasing across the globe.⁵ At the same time, the European Union (EU) has estimated that over 40 per cent of its water resources⁶ are being wasted.
• Global resources: Within this hour an area the size of 900 football fields will have been destroyed in the Amazon Rainforest, a major source of oxygen production for Planet Earth.⁷ In South East Asia and in the virgin Siberian forests⁸ there is similar devastation. Forests that have stood for millions of years are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Financially, the EU has estimated that the total cost of environmental damage is more than $8 million⁹ every hour. However, we are all aware that the impact is much more than economic. It is devastating other species who also call Planet Earth home. Thousands of bird, mammal and fish species are currently on the endangered lists.
• Extreme poverty: Within this hour more than 1 billion people will be struggling to survive on less than $1 a day and a further 2.5 billion people will be living on $2 a day.¹⁰ Within this hour, over $300,000 of International Development Aid will be provided to try to tackle this inequity, yet less than half of this funding will reach those for whom it was intended.¹¹
• Global health: Within this hour over 250 people will have been infected with HIV/Aids,¹² however, only 20 per cent of these people will have access to treatment. More than 200 young children will have died from diseases associated with poor hygiene and lack of sanitation,¹³ and over 50 women in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia will have died from preventable complications during pregnancy or childbirth.¹⁴ Over 350 people will have died of tobacco-related illnesses.
• Universal education: Within this hour over 70 million children will still not have access even to basic primary education¹⁵ and there will be over 800 million illiterate people, many of whom will struggle to find work.¹⁶
• Conflict and peace: Within this hour a further $130 million will have been spent on global military expenditure – contributing to a total cost of over $1,200 billion per year.¹⁷ In contrast, United Nations (UN) expenditure within this same hour on Peacekeeping will be less than $1 million, despite the fact that there are currently at least 18 significant unresolved conflicts taking place¹⁸ on Planet Earth. Global expenditure on Peacekeeping therefore translates to less than $7 billion a year, compared to more than $1,200 billion military expenditure.
• Global finances: Global GDP turnover will be over $70 billion within this hour, or over $650,000 billion ($65 trillion)¹⁹ per year – arguably more than sufficient funds to address the global challenges we have just reviewed.

These examples give a sense of the scale of the...