Beauty and the beast (of climate change)

Could the latest beauty craze that is apparently reaching our shores be something that helps us address climate change? According to an article in the Times today (although reported some time ago in the Daily Mail) the latest beauty craze, something that might eclipse Botox, is encouraging us to inject carbon dioxide into your skin to make you look young and beautiful again.

Not sure I have any desire to inject CO2 into my skin, but perhaps if it really takes off it could be more successful than carbon capture and storage? Move over E.ON and Scottish Power - here comes some really beautiful CCS!

Colour invasion bringing smiles and tears

There's a zesty new trend emerging, and it's trying to change your mood.

I, like a couple of thousand other Londoners, wander across Jubilee Bridge on my way home from work each day, enjoying the view of London sprawled along the Thames. The scene is uplifting, but it’s undeniably grey. Except, that is, for the bright yellow staircase of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on southbank. There’s something about dazzling and unexpected colour that makes me smile – and apparently I’m not alone.

Italian architect Renzo Piano recently shocked London by unveiling what he felt was the perfect coating for the new sustainable offices at Central Saint Giles (pictured). It’s an effort to show that sustainability isn’t just about what a building does (or, in terms of carbon footprint, what it doesn’t do); it can also be about how it does it. The zesty orange, yellow and green shine out in an effort to create a “joyful heart” in the city and “make a positive contribution to this part of the West End”.

It’s not just London that’s getting a colourful makeover. In March, Dulux launched a new chapter in its green agenda, with an international outreach project to help us “live our lives in colour”. The idea is to equip enthusiastic community volunteers with brushes and cans of paint to splash more colour into the world. So far they’ve colourfied communities as far apart as Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Jodhpur in India. This week they’re in Istanbul.

Not everyone’s a fan of this colour invasion. The Guardian recently suggested that looking at Central Saint Giles, you’d be forgiven for thinking that giant mutant radioactive chewy sweets had invaded the world. Perhaps that’s a little extreme. At least we know that if the good weather doesn’t last, we have something else to dazzle us this summer.

Orange wellies hit festivals

Summer is here and the festival season has kicked off. Every year you hear of a new sustainable initiative from eco festivals that aim to be carbon neutral, eco tents that are recyclable, through to recycling incentives of beer and chocolate for festival goers who pick up a bag of rubbish during their stay.

One of the brands well known for sustainable festival gadgets, is Orange, helping to power mobiles when conventional power is lacking. They introduced the dance powered mobile phone charger at Glastonbury and their latest addition thermoelectric wellies that charge your mobile are bound to be a hit in the English, not always so sunny summer!

So with your wellies on, your bin bag and eadible tent to hand, you're ready to minimise your impact and have fun at the next festival near you.

'Because that's how Piers sees it'...but is it enough?

If anyone could bear to sit through Piers Morgan’s World Cup South Africa programme last night with its African chanting in the background and Piers Morgan fighting back the tears as he listened to clips of Nelson Mandela’s famous inaugural speech from 1994, then you are perhaps a more tolerant person than I am. However, Piers Morgan firmly aside, the programme was actually delivering a really important message about the role of sport within South African communities. Sport, and particularly football, is so much more than a game – it improves the physical and mental wellbeing of the population, it brings people together, it provides a platform for the delivery of vital public health message, it teaches tolerance, fair play, discipline and valuable leadership and teamwork skills and for many it is what keeps them going from one day to the next. Today, many agree that sport could be a very effective means of achieving the Millennium Development Goals that Kiri mentioned in her last post.

Sport as a tool for social change is not a new concept - organisations such as the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation have been funding projects worldwide that are delivering and promoting sport for development for many years. However, although there has been a lot of talk, there are still very few governments, donors, NGOs and businesses that are actually taking action to recognise, invest in and advance sport for development. Will the World Cup in South Africa change this? There have been lots of discussions about the social legacy of the tournament and the responsibility of different stakeholders to ensure that the benefits don’t end when the final match whistle blows, but is it enough? It would be nice to think that Piers and even Glee’s Sue Sylvester talking about the benefits of sport is a sign that times are changing but I am understandably sceptical. The World Cup is a rare opportunity to influence attitudes and opinions, a chance to put sport firmly on the agenda – let’s not leave it up to Piers to make this happen.

Virtually impossible to pick one... but let's see...

I've been keeping my eye on The Global Poverty Project for a while now. As we all know, our new Prime Minister Cameron, along with the world's leaders, will be gathering in New York in September to assess the progress in achieving The Millennium Development Goals. If you're not familiar with the eight goals, here they are:

1. Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger

2. Achieve Universal Primary Education

3. Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women

4. Reduce child mortality

5. Improve maternal health

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases

7. Ensure environmental sustainability

8. Develop a Global Partnership for Development

This project is asking us to choose which goal we feel needs the greatest attention. Now some might say this is an exercise in futility but seeing the general consensus could be very revealing. All the issues since 2000 have had major improvements but it's evident that some areas are still failing. The new government has said that they will "create new mechanisms to give British people a direct say in how an element of the aid budget is spent." So by making a choice through The Global Poverty Project we can all make our voice heard. And this may make for a very interesting Review Summit.

A glass ceiling worth smashing?

Last Thursday, Abigail Hofman and Tracy Hofman, writing in the Financial Times, asked us to consider “whether it matters that women are under-represented on the boards of financial institutions”. At first glance, this might seem like rather an un-PC question. Today, a wealth of legislation and conventions recognise gender equality as a right – even if not quite a reality.

I don’t know whether Hofman and Hofman were aware of the ironic timing of their controversial question, but last Thursday also happened to be the opening day of the 2010 Global Summit of Women. As City folk perused the Financial Times over their morning coffee, China’s Vice President Xi Jinping was opening the Summit in Beijing with the proud declaration that China, like other global powers, is dedicated to the development of women’s careers.

So, gender equality in business is high profile – but does it matter? The FT article was a response to the recently-published report by the Treasury Committee, ‘Women in the City’, which sought to explain how gender diversity (or rather, a lack of it) might have played a role in the Banking Crisis. According to the latest Female FTSE report, only 9% of boards of FTSE 100 banks are women. “We believe the lack of diversity on the boards of many, if not most, of our major financial institutions, may have heightened the problems of ‘group-think’ and made effective challenge and scrutiny of executive decisions less effective”, the Treasury report concludes.

You may well be wondering if there’s much hard evidence to back up the claim that gender diversity in management is a stabilising factor for business. Well, yes, there’s rather a lot. Detailed research by Catalyst, for example, found that U.S. Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women on their top management teams secured a 35% higher Return on Equity and 34% higher Total Return to Shareholders compared to companies with lowest women’s representation. Interesting research has also been published by The Conference Board of Canada and the Aziz Corporation, with the latter indicating that many CEOs themselves blame the financial crisis partially on a ‘macho’ culture of risk taking.

This is all more than an interesting discussion for businesses that are looking to secure good corporate governance and clear financial oversight – the ones that are looking for sustainability. Certainly, we know consumers are going to keep sustainability and ethics firmly on the agenda, as recent news of customers flocking to the ethically branded Co-op bank reminds us. But businesses don’t need to wait for their customers to push them to be more sustainable, more diverse, more forward-thinking. Gender equality is a good bandwagon to jump on. Not just because “it’s right”, but because it the smart thing to do.

One step forward...

Most of the stories we read about supermarkets and ‘green’ products are positive ones – about new innovations reaching our shelves. Unfortunately, things have recently moved in the other direction at Waitrose, where eco milk pouches and jugs – a smart innovation that uses 75% less plastic than traditional bottles and much less energy in production – have been withdrawn from the shelves after poor sales. Even though the pouches are marginally cheaper than traditional milk bottles, but Waitrose believes its consumer preferred the convenience of the old-style containers.

This raises an interesting question about how consumers can be persuaded to try, and adopt, new products that are better for the environment but differ from what they are used to. And not least because Sainsbury’s has had quite a different experience – its milk pouches and jugs have flown off the shelves during trials in 50 stores, and are now being rolled out nationwide. Sales of bags at Sainsbury’s already account for one in every 10 two-pint containers of semi-skimmed sold.

So what did Waitrose do wrong? Are Waitrose and Sainsbury’s customers really so different? Sainsbury’s attributes its success to spending time educating consumers about the new product, starting with handing them out to all employees so that they would become ambassadors for it. Perhaps Waitrose's mistake was to assume that its customers' appetites for greener products were so strong that the pouches would fly off the shelf as soon as they appeared.

The lesson here might be that, whilst consumers consistently express interest in seeing more environmentally friendly alternatives on supermarket shelves, this appetite is something that needs to be carefully cultivated into a willingness to change purchasing habits and accept doing things a little differently. Retailers taking the time to really talk to consumers about green choices, and educate them about new products, can only help. Manufacturers and retailers are doing well to introduce more and more ‘eco’ alternatives into their product ranges, and it would be a real shame if that hard work is undone because consumers haven’t been persuaded to give them a try.