Environment as a “New Kind of Capitalism”.

NRM North column for Tasmanian Business Reporter. Feb 2010.

In a recent edition of the Harvard Business Review, a number of authors have begun promoting the need for business to not simply support environmental and social causes in a philanthropic manner, but to build, or rebuild their core business around products which enhance social and environmental outcomes. To use an environmental analogy, it is the difference between offsetting pollution and not polluting in the first place.

This is a substantive shift in thinking for many business owners who, mostly with really good intentions, have been good corporate citizens by supporting an organisation or cause. And this is still a very valid thing to do. Many not for profit organisations or causes are able to meet specific and immediate environmental outcomes or societal needs far more effectively than those businesses could themselves. And I suspect philanthropy and support of causes/organisations will remain an important way for business to engage in those needs.

But the authors in the Harvard Business Review were making the point that business must see environmental and social needs, not just as something to “offset” through sponsorship or philanthropy but as a business opportunity in itself. A “New Kind of Capitalism” they called it. Businesses and individuals grasping the opportunities to develop products and services which meet some of those needs and turns a good profit.

So what might it look like? There are many examples around of businesses which already do this in the environmental space. Developers who build sustainable housing and create developments which include environmental spaces for biodiversity as well as social interaction. Companies who produce and sell renewable energy. Primary producers who focus on sustainability. Small business owners who sell locally grown and made products. Architects who design for minimum energy use.

As we move into a more open and self conscious society, we have a great opportunity to do business which is directed at improving environmental and social outcomes and which turns a decent profit. And the first steps for businesses may well be letting their staff get their hands dirty in this space. (Other than customers, they are often the best innovators). And that is where NGO’s like NRM North can help. We are happy to find ways for individuals and organisations to participate in environmental and sustainability issues and activities. Who knows what profitable business innovation may come from it.

Business going Green

NRM North column for Tasmanian Business Reporter. Jan 2010.

Why should I go green with my business? Does it really pay for business to go green? Is the market willing to pay the costs for green products? Well, yes and no. Plenty of businesses have and are profited from riding the initial wave of consumer demand for “greened up” products. Take any number of products from cars and cosmetics, to paper, pens and everything in between. Tweak the manufacturing process, grab a certification (unless you can get away without it) and market to the segment willing to pay you a premium. And that is sometimes fair enough. Until the demand for environmentally sustainable products and services gets high enough, the “green” element will only ever be a market segment.

But the question is really the wrong question. It should be; why aren’t I building my whole business around environmental sustainability? For any business to survive, it has to be financially sustainable. Most businesses don’t last very long without social sustainability, looking after staff, good governance and good customer/client relationships. In fact these are simply basic business management expectations. So why not environmental sustainability?

After all, virtually every business relies to some degree on our common natural resources. We all use water, fuel and air. Most businesses ultimately rely on primary production of one sort or another from minerals and water to food and fibre, to produce their products and services. And these are not infinite resources. It is in the interests of business to use resources in a way which ensures long term supply and quality. It starts with thinking about environmental sustainability, not simply as a marketable add on, but as the third foundation for good long term business practice. And it can start simply.

As an example, NRM North, the Launceston Chamber of Commerce, the Launceston City Council and other partners identified an opportunity to engage small and medium size businesses (SME’s) in understanding and reducing their environmental footprint. The partners see environmental sustainability of business as a key opportunity for the city from an economic, environmental and social point of view.

The result was a program (EcoSmartBiz) which focused on reducing the impact of business on the environment through reduced emissions, water use and waste. The project phase was well oversubscribed, demonstrating that even small businesses are looking to take action to reduce their environmental footprint. And in the process of making this a part of their business practice, they started saving money. So yes, it really can pay for business to go “green”, to build environmental sustainability as a core part of their business practices. It can pay now and will certainly pay in the future.

Engagement

Dinner Speech Australasian University Community Engagement Association (AUCEA) Conference July 2010 (Edited)

I am glad I now I know how to pronounce your acronym. I was pronouncing it Auca which conjures up images of South American Indians, who incidentally had their own version of community engagement via warriors and spears. A U CEA has a much more sophisticated ring to it and I am sure, more sophisticated ways of engagement.

I have to admit to having never heard of AUCEA until Ann Langworthy and Jo Archer landed in my office one day and enthusiastically described the conference and why I should be involved. Resistance was obviously futile in the face of two determined women and it was a good opportunity to demonstrate our partnership and engagement with UTAS.

NRM North is a statute based body, established in 2002 to undertake regional planning for our natural resources, to invest in achieving community aspirations for those natural resources and to engage the community in understanding and the best use of those natural resources.

We are one of three regions in Tasmania and one of 56 in Australia. In your satchels you have a list of the 56. We figured that there was no point in promoting our wares to most of you, so instead wanted to encourage you to contact you own regional NRM Body/CMA/NRM Region and see what engagement opportunities you might unearth.

NRM North is a funny beast in that it has two masters, a minister and a community driven association. While that can create reporting and constitutional nightmares at times, when it comes to engagement, we have the advantage of a foot in both camps. Engaging with government can be tortuous, almost as tortuous as engaging with a university.

And engaging with community around some of the more contentious issues that we deal with, native forests, drinking water quality, silt in the Tamar Estuary, forestry, regional land use planning, is quite literally dancing on a tightrope over the Nigeria falls at times. But it is those difficult parts of engagement that are also the most satisfying. To take a sceptical community and see them develop their own innovative solutions with an eye on the future. To take divided communities and broker a new perspective. The hard bits are generally the best bits in engagement, at least after the wash up.

Allow me a little philosophical aside. So often engagement is thought of purely as an activity, something just to be done. And yet to connect with others it is the most basic of human instincts, except maybe for hermits. It is the fuel that drives so much of our emotional fulfilment, when we engage with others, we find new ways in which to relate and grow. Some of us do find it harder than others. According to Myer Briggs I am 90% introverted and even I can see the benefit of engagement with others. And it really is no different at an organisational level. Institutions after all are made up of people. The challenge is to find a collective vision for engagement with those whom we collectively agree are the relationships which will offer the most in fulfilling mutual needs.

But I digress. Let me give you a snapshot of our relationship with UTAS and the engagement that has generated.

We have worked with UTAS and the AMC pretty much since our inception in 2002 (and I suspect the NRM regions in your patch may well be doing the same with your uni) but it was not until recently that we gave that activity, and a whole bunch of new relationships and activities, a formal affiliation through an MOU. And I acknowledge the effort of Jo Archer in getting that process going and David Rich who willingly, I think, signed up for us to engage and work together.

As a result we are providing 3 undergraduate/honours scholarships a year and at the moment are negotiating our 3^rd PhD scholarship. One of these is developing 3D virtual realities for engaging people with climate change. In other words, promise the sceptic a 3d reality game and suddenly finds himself in an altered world where climate change is a reality. Instant conversion. Real engagement!. The focus of all these scholarships are areas of common interest but most importantly, the recipents come and sit in our office for at least a few weeks in the year, participate in our team meetings and are mentored by a staff member, they become part of our team. Nothing very new I know, but imagine the level of engagement with all the community sectors if a critical mass of organisations took on students in this way.

We also provide staff to do occasional lecturing in their areas of expertise and interest. This provides them with a breather from the office and an opportunity to get away from the day to day grind and spend some “thinking” time. Students love it, they get to heckle someone different. My staff love it because it is something different to spreadsheets.

We have agreed with the AMC to be part of their staff “Friday drinks” to build the relationships in an informal setting. We use UTAS research facilities and people in a commercial way. In fact we have spent over a million dollars through various research projects this way. We are collaborating along with some other partners in a large scale landscape public art exhibition. We have a number of UTAS staff both chairing and participating in our many technical committees. We have a UTAS staff member on our board. David even kindly lent his board room for a recent board meeting. We have sponsored a whole range of events and activities in conjunction with UTAS, from films to theatre and some pretty out there stuff for us. One of these was a photographic exhibition of the underwater world of the Tamar. This was a fantastic collaboration between a UTAS researcher who had these amazing photos of what life under the water really looks like, and an organisation was just dying to get the message out that the Tamar is not all mud and silt and that it really is worth protecting.

All in the effort to engage the community at large in what we, UTAS and NRM North, have to collectively offer for the common good.

So out of all that, what have I learnt. Engagement is not just an activity, it’s about teaming up together to kick goals, but more than that, to find ways to together make the world a better place through our expanded knowledge, our collective actions and our relationships.

Let me finish with my favourite innovation quote

Nearly 100% of innovation – from business to politics – is inspired not by “market analysis” but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.

True engagement comes, not from some beauracratic imperative but from people who are sick of the status quo and want to make our institutions more useful, our communities more active and the world a better place. And so I hope AUCEA continues to do the fantastic work it is in promoting just that within our future leaders and thinkers.

NRM and Agriculture

Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Tasmania’s agricultural future. (AIAST Conf Presentation Edited)

At the core of Tasmania’s ability to have a long term quality based agricultural future is the quality of our natural resources. Whether soils, water or the supporting natural systems, their quality is paramount to both our ability to produce and also to the marketability of that product.

Given the relatively small land mass we occupy, and divide that by a third and we are not talking about large slabs of land. But what we do have is highly productive while ever we continue to support that capacity and not run it down. And that is the catch.

All farmers and land managers are managers of natural resources. But they can generally only see their patch and maybe a bit beyond. The task for NRM organisations is to provide a much broader perspective to planning and day to day activities at a farm and regional level and everywhere in between. This perspective involves understanding the knowledge that exists at all those levels, including the knowledge that exists at a farm level from many generations of observation, and working to make sense of it at the landscape level.

Why bother? Because we are not ultimately dealing with individual farms when it comes to managing natural resources. What happens 5 farms up the valley has a direct impact on your farm over time. And so for the state to continue to maintain and improve its productive capacity, we need to be managing the big picture of our natural resources.

But it does not stop there. Just having the knowledge at an institutional level is no help to anyone and so NRM organisations along with others continue to have a key role in extending and helping apply that perspective.

One of the reasons the NRM regions have been actively supporting, investing in and developing property management planning is as a mechanism to do just this. We are able to collect information at a property level, add that to our knowledge at a catchment and regional level (and sometimes state level) and build a reasonable picture of where we are at with our natural resources and the issues which are arising that need to be thought about and acted on. That same mechanism allows us to provide a landscape perspective into planning at a farm level.

But not only does good natural resource management maintain productive capacity, it supports Tasmanian agricultures chief advantage, marketing our image. While the marketing itself is not a key NRM role, providing some of the underpinning sustainability management frameworks for the marketers to use is. Branding or image increasingly requires verification and demonstration of claims. And because NRM bodies are squarely in the space of supporting natural resource management, we are well placed to support some of the foundations that demonstrate our agricultural credentials.

We are, whether we like it or not, one of the more agriculturally reliant states in Australia. I think it is a good thing but it does mean the community at large needs to have an appreciation of this and a stronger connection to agriculture.

At a more domestic level, we need to bring a great understanding of sustainable agriculture to urban communities. Until consumers (and that includes industries which value add primary produce) better understand the impact they have on natural resources and the people managing them, the agricultural sector at large will find maintaining natural resource capital increasingly difficult.

And finally, for Tasmania to prosper, we do need to make good use of the resources we have and the irrigation development process is obviously seeking to do just this. And as with any development which dramatically changes industry, especially a natural resource based industry such as agriculture, there needs to be the constructive but sometimes annoying word of caution. When it comes to irrigation development there are plenty of those. We must continue to examine the sustainability, from source to use, to ensure we do not exceed the capacity of our natural resources. And from all indications this is occurring. We just cannot afford to stop keeping our eye on it.

John Ruskin famously said, “The bitterness of poor quality is forgotten long after the pleasure of low cost is forgotten”.

The role of NRM organisations in Tasmanian agriculture is to  work in partnership with the sector to bring perspectives, activities and initiatives which support the long term sustainability of Agriculture in Tasmania so that in 50 or 100 years time we are not regretting the poor quality of our actions now.