Derek DeightonTrailblazer Business Futures

Low Carbon Education & Business Support

Helping Balance the One Planet Equation through Creative Partnerships

Business in the Third Millennium

The Introduction

Sustainable – is a destination and an impossible

dream – Shangri-La

Sustainability – is a never-ending journey and an

adventurous challenge.

But many don’t possess a passport for this journey as

a 2005 Ofsted research into the relevance of education for the workplace found that only 12% strongly agreed that education had –

“enabled them to understand risk, challenge ideas or be creative.”

For any educational institution, if we accept the view that resources are constrained, whether, economically, environmentally or socially, then the answer to the question ‘what are we here for’ can only be,

 “We are here to liberate the creativity needed to enable our stakeholders to continually reduce the ‘resource intensity of society’ at continually reducing ‘resource intensity of Learning’

Economic Environmental

Social© D Deighton 2005

In a resource constrained environment the OPE fixes the product of population, consumption and the ‘resource intensity’ at 1

If we then reduce the resource constraint, in this case CO2 by 80% then the 1 becomes 0.2

If we also have population and consumption change then we arrive at a range of CO2 Intensities

See Handout

We define CO2 Intensity as the amount of CO2 that can be emitted per capita per unit of consumption

As can be seen from the handout for a 80% the reduction varies from around 7X to 13X for the UK, depending on whether we factor in growth

From this analysis it is clear that whilst some, perhaps many, new skills will be needed to enable the knowledge and new technologies that are inherently ‘low carbon’

Change on this scale requires a reordering of society and the rediscovery of lost skills as we have to replace fossil fuel energy with human energy again in as many processes as possible

In the coming CO2 constrained world, whether by policy or necessity, we are going to have to decide as a society, which jobs products and services are essential to us and which aren’t

That is, which ones add ‘CO2 Value’ to society

These are the ones we will have to create with the, mainly, ‘local ‘ and ‘appropriate’ skills we develop, in the next 20 or so years

The One Planet Equation is immutable– whether we choose to ignore it or not!