Green Earth Africa

Sir David Attenborough voices an animated short film highlighting the value and importance of the world’s forests to mark World Environment Day on Sunday 5 June, organised by theUN Environment Programme

One year after the Gulf oil spill: A widow learns to adjust to life without her husband. A charter fisherman feels the effect of canceled trips. A well worker considers quitting, but the paycheck proves too enticing. Nearly one year after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up, killing 11 people and starting the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, life goes on with many adjustments in the Gulf of Mexico. Read more about the BP oil spill aftermath.

THE world’s financial system really is like a jungle – a realisation that may save it from disaster.

An ecological theorist and the Bank of England’s head of stability have teamed up to show that if you apply the mathematical models used in ecology to financial systems, they behave much like ecosystems – with similar risks of collapse. Worryingly, the models bankers now use maximise exactly those risks.

Until the 1970s, ecologists believed that the more complex the ecosystem, the more stable: lose one species and the rest fill in. Then Robert May, now at the University of Oxford, and others showed that such complex systems have critical points at which a change in one species can have dramatic and non-linear effects on others. Losses can propagate, and even cause collapse. The stronger the connections and fewer differences there are among species, the greater the risk.

A complicated and delicate system (Image: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty)

By substituting various kinds of lending and assets for predation, cooperation and competition, May and banker Andy Haldane show that the global financial system might behave similarly (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09659). Yet bankers still think like 1960s ecologists, they say.

Banks maximise their connectivity and similarity in an effort to increase stability, when in fact this may do the opposite. Pricing models for financial products called derivatives, central to the 2008 crisis, also wrongly exclude non-linear effects. May and Haldane think more ecological financial models might stave off another crisis.

In the face of a looming environmental and demographic crisis, weak companies will go to the wall. Only those that address the needs of a rapidly changing world will prosper

Crop harvesting in Germany. A shortage of arable farmland is leading to intercontinental ‘land grabs’ creating greater pressure on the environment and provoking political crises. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

A few diehards in the City still think sustainability is just for sandal-wearers. But how we deal with the major ecological and social challenges facing the world will have enormous implications for the global economy and for the prospects of the UK’s leading companies. It will also have an impact on the pension savings and the purse strings of virtually every household in Britain. The BP oil spill, which wiped billions of pounds off the value of pension funds, is evidence that no investor, large or small, can afford to ignore the environment, or the issue of how we manage our resources.

The Observer has commissioned in-depth research from The Co-operative Asset Management into how the UK’s leading companies might be affected by five key sustainability issues: resource depletion, climate change, pollution, demographics and resource distribution. Its analysis suggests that 56%, or more than half of the FTSE 350 by weight, will suffer negative financial effects from depleting resources, climate change and pollution. Only 10% stand to gain by providing solutions.

This is a warning of testing times ahead for both business and society. It also presents a major challenge for the pensions industry, which needs to ensure its investments will be able to provide people with retirement incomes.

Ecology

Business should care about ecological sustainability because of the increasing scientific evidence that human society is overshooting its limits. Sources of food, energy and water are being exploited at rates that cannot be sustained for long, and many pollution sinks are overfilled. This is likely to jeopardise economic activity and growth, and leaves us at risk of a sharp contraction.

Both climate change and oil production are inextricably linked to food, energy and water systems. Oil depletion, for example, would have significant effects on food supplies, as many fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides are oil-based. Biofuels may compete with food for land use and oil use drives climate change, which adds pressure to the water, food and living systems.

The critical questions for economic sustainability are, first, whether these factors will come to impose an absolute ceiling on global economic growth and, second, to what extent these limits can be pushed back or overcome. As the government-commissioned Stern report pointed out, our actions now and in the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to the economy and society on a scale similar to the two world wars and the Great Depression.

Large companies recognise that they have a vested interest in this. In 2008, Shell outlined two distinct and plausible scenarios. It describes the bleaker scenario as a “scramble” or a disorderly decline in conventional economic growth as resources are exploited past the point of no return, in an environment where policy becomes dysfunctional and governments become protectionist about their national resources. The alternative, “blueprint” scenario involves a rocky transition to a new economic paradigm that requires a mixture of restrained use of resources, technological revolution and increasingly co-ordinated policy at local, national and global levels.

In June, the Green Investment Bank Commission Report put a price of £550bn on the infrastructure spending needed before 2020 to decarbonise the UK alone. If the right policies and investment are put in place this will not only help ensure the future, but provide opportunities for businesses and investors.

Even with such spending, companies – and the rest of us – face huge challenges including peak oil, the point at which production begins an inexorable fall, and the decline in biodiversity.

The numbers of non-human vertebrates have fallen more than 30% between 1970 and 2005: a decline highly detrimental to the functioning of ecosystems on which food supply depends. Many other species are also suffering – the dramatic decline in the bee population, a major pollinator for agriculture, is a key example.

Businesses are likely to be pushed into innovation and behaviour change to optimise resource efficiency and pollute less. That may reduce the constraints on growth and lead to new markets, for instance in clean energy. But there is still a significant risk that global economic growth will slow and turn negative because of ecological limitations. There is also significant potential for resource wars, particularly civil and border conflicts over water and fertile land.

Society

We all need food, shelter, education and healthcare, along with the ability to make a decent living. A key aspect of sustainability is meeting basic human needs within the planet’s means. These concerns are shaping the actions of some of world’s very richest: this month 38 billionaires have joined Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in pledging to give away over half their wealth.

Demographics are a major issue here. The world’s population is expected to grow from around 6.7 billion to 9 billion by 2050. Aside from the obvious pressures on resources, most of the increase will come from developing countries and that will increase pressure to distribute wealth and resources more equally, and to improve the situation of the poor.

Many developed economies, including the UK and the US, have ageing populations, which presents its own risks to economic growth. People’s contribution to the economy declines in older age and a smaller working-age population will have to struggle to support the elderly.

Poverty is linked to global insecurity and provides a breeding ground for terrorism. Recent global crises, including food price spikes, climate change and the credit crunch, have hit the poor hardest. Many large companies have considerable power either to exacerbate or to relieve these problems and could play a major role in realising the United Nations’ millennium development goals.

Companies, especially multinationals, can make an important contribution to building sustainable societies by being responsive to the needs of poor people. The financial crisis has shown that corporate social responsibility and “ethical business” are no longer an add-on activity aimed at “taking off the worst edges” of the free-market system, but critical to a more stable functioning and should therefore be embedded in the way companies work and think. For forward-thinking enterprises, there is frequently a reward to be found in new markets.

In particular, companies need to be wise to the situation of women. More than two-thirds of the billion people living on less than a dollar a day are female. In developing or agricultural economies, women undertake a vast proportion of the work, particularly relating to water and food gathering. Women in traditional societies have a wealth of farming experience and present a major opportunity for efficient husbandry of resources, but only if they are empowered to make decisions.

Similarly, if women are educated, skilled and able to work, research has shown they use their incomes to plough back into their family, creating benefits for societies as a whole by spending on healthcare, education and better food.

Food

When the Russian wheat harvest failed this year because of drought, it drove wheat prices up 80%. This echoed a broader surge in food prices in 2008 that caused social unrest in a number of African countries. We do not know if climate change caused the drought, but we do know that it will bring increased volatility in future.

In general terms, we are witnessing symptoms of an agricultural system that is reaching crisis point at a time of growing demand from millions of people in Asia whose standard of living is rising. The biggest mining company in the world, BHP Billiton, is bidding for the world’s largest listed producer of potash, a fertiliser that will be in much demand as emerging markets show increased appetite for meat and dairy products.

Unpredictable weather and bottlenecks affecting critical resources are enough of a problem, but the agricultural system will have to meet a host of other challenges.

The first challenge comes from within the industry itself. Agriculture has a huge impact on the environment as many fertilisers release nitrous oxide, which has 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.

An equally pressing problem is linked to the limited availability of arable land. A shortage of farms for growing crops has led to a land grab across the world as governments and corporations seek to secure food supplies. The issue is explosive, as Madagascar discovered two years ago. A proposed deal in 2008 with Korean car giant Daewoo to lease 1m acres of land to grow corn for Korea resulted in a civil revolt and a coup. Compounding such issues, in many countries where water is in short supply it is used intensively for crops or products which are then exported.

Politics is not the only significant factor. Around the world, natural habitats are being converted to human use at an alarming rate, accelerating climate change, with deforestation at the worst end of spectrum.

Experts suggest that the underlying trend is for commodity prices to rise. How will this affect business? A good rule of thumb is that a bit of inflation is good for industry, while too much destroys demand.

Companies that may benefit from the new challenges are likely to include those that can ensure continuity of supply and have enough pricing power to pass on costs. In general, food producers and retailers are likely to reap dividends from price inflation, apart from vendors of animal products, where customers are likely to be put off by sharp price rises. Tobacco and beverage companies appear to be beneficiaries: high margins indicate they have few problems in passing on cost increases.

Water

It is estimated that feeding a world population estimated to climb to 9 billion by 2050 will require twice as much water for agriculture compared with today.

Only 2.5% of the world’s water resources are fresh, of which two thirds is frozen; oil is not the only resource we should worry about running out of. The market for water-related products and services today is put at over $480bn and set to increase rapidly.

Opportunities for water companies are limitless. Enterprising companies can concentrate on finding new reservoirs, updating infrastructure, fixing leaks, installing water meters to encourage customers to use less, and exploring desalination technology, though the latter is energy- and carbon-intensive.

But companies in general have a role to play. Beverages companies are among the leaders when it comes to water management. SAB Miller, for instance, has invested significant management time in understanding water-supply challenges and their related business implications. It has formed partnerships with public and non-governmental organisations, having acknowledged that water is too complex an issue for any one company or stakeholder to tackle on its own.

For nuclear energy companies, challenges lie ahead. Nuclear power has been billed as a cleaner option than coal, but nuclear power plants use up to 83% more water per megawatt. The blueprint for meeting future energy demands tend to concentrate on CO2 emissions, while largely overlooking water consideration. Clearly, there is much work to be done.

What about the implications of water for the digital industry? How many people know that a data centre operating chillers and cooling towers can consumer 18,000 gallons of water daily to dissipate the heat generated by the IT equipment? The water footprint of the internet and e-commerce is huge and growing fast. Few companies will remain unaffected by the need to manage water resources more efficiently.

Without action to create more sustainable societies, economic activity will be threatened by wars, political coups, terrorism and mass migration, whilst the shadow of resource constraints looms large. But if more people are pulled out of poverty, societies are likely to be more stable and new consumer markets will open up to companies prepared to serve them.

Niall O’Shea, head of responsible investing at The Co-operative Asset Management, says: “When the recession fades, governments and companies will have to reckon with the troubling health indicators of the planet, which pose the most formidable challenges to economic stability. Our study shows that while the risks to some companies are great, so are the opportunities for the far-sighted and the early movers.”

In the near future, enormous demands will be placed on the earth’s resources. There is a wave of aspiration from disadvantaged sections of society around the world and new consumer demands from an emerging global middle class; the challenge is achieving growth and satisfying people’s desire for goods and services without destroying the planet.

Despite the challenges ahead, courageous companies can still prosper. Governments, consumers and businesses are slowly moving to support those that provide solutions to the planet’s growing pains.

Brazil would not be the first nation to become rich from its resources – but its challenge is to compete economically without destroying its environment

The Itaipu hydroelectric dam stands along the Parana River in Foz do Iguacu, Brazil. Photograph: Adriano Machado/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Outside Dr Gilberto Cãmara’s office, there is a large and beautiful satellite map of Brazil. From the fractal elegance of the Amazon and its tributaries, to the ochre fields holding sugar, soy and cattle, to the twinkling mega-cities of São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro in the south, the map shows why he thinks Brazil can be the world’s first environmental superpower.

Cãmara leads Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE). His startling claim, he explains in his easy English, rests on turning a piece of standard economic theory on its head. Nations develop their economies by moving up the value chain, away from churning out commodities and towards manufacturing, say the textbooks. Brazil has abundant natural resources, so the key to prosperity is to start making stuff, right? Wrong, he says, because of the “China effect“.

China mass manufactures at rock bottom prices, with the consequence that over the past two decades the cost of manufactured goods has fallen fast, while demand has pushed up cost of the commodities used to make the goods.

Camara has adopted the slogan: “Brazil – the natural knowledge economy“. He describes this as applying knowledge and technology to commodities to boost their value, and reels off examples: biofuels, in which Brazil leads world research thanks to its sugar cane ethanol and growing biodiesel production; renewable energy – 47% of the country’s energy is already green, a world record; and climate change – Brazil’s Amazon is vital to the planet’s health. Of course, it also has plenty of timber, beef, iron and aluminium, though he doesn’t boast about those.

“Brazil’s natural knowledge economy offers more opportunities for internal [national] research than our manufacturing industry,” he says. “There is no opportunity in, say cars, as VW designs those in Germany.” Camara also suggests the approach will allow Brazil to avoid the “resources curse“, reeling off Venezuela, Angola, Saudi Arabia and Sierra Leone as examples. Brazil wouldn’t be the first nation to get rich on its resources, but it aims to be the first to do without destroying its own economy or environment.

So what are the catches? Having just travelled through the Amazon and then to meet ministers and other senior officials in the capital Brasilia, as well as scientists and green campaigners, I can think of a few: the country’s jumbo oil discoveries, continuing deforestation, fast rising energy needs, a vast rich-poor divide and widespread local corruption and insecurity, not to mention whether they can find a way to get paid the premium needed to fund environmental responsibility.

First, let’s take the vast oil finds off the coast of Rio – 50bn barrels of it – which within a few years will make Brazil a global petro-power. That, Brazil’s special ambassador for climate change Sergio Serra told me, presents a “big challenge”.

“Our present policy is not to change the energy mix,” he said, which is currently dominated by hydroelectric power and biofuels. “But of course the temptation will be great, enormous.” An economy supercharged by petrol would not be very environmental.

Keeping to your greenhouse gas emissions pledges would be, on the other hand. And, gushing oil or not, environment minister Izabella Teixeira, says Brazil will meet its 2020 targets, which are pretty tough for an emerging country like Brazil. The key is stopping deforestation, particularly in the Amazon, and the latest figures suggest they are making fast progress. But populist changes proposed to the Forest Code laws protecting the forest, bolstered by Brazil’s chasm between rich and poor and allegations of a rich world conspiracy to keep Brazil poor, pose a serious threat.

Nonetheless, Teixeira is clear that the economic development of the Amazon region, and the infrastructure to achieve it, will forge ahead. This despite protests such as those that attracted Avatar director James Cameron to the Belo Monte dam site recently. “I cannot forget this region,” she tells me. “When we talk of hydropower, 66% of the potential is still in the Amazon. Can you imagine a country that has this not using this? Impossible.”

Maurio Zimmermann, the energy minister, shows an equally green conviction with a series of verbal punches: 50% of the fuel in Brazil’s cars is ethanol; the government auction to buy 2,400MW of wind power was oversubscribed by four times; Brazil is on target to be the second biggest uranium producer; carbon capture and storage experiments are underway.

He also mentions the 13 million Brazilians who have gained access to electricity for the first time in the last few years, with the final 300,000 switching on the lights next year. A tremendous achievement, and one he happily admits will drive up demand for power.

Another bold claim comes from the head of the country’s environmental protection agency, Ibama. Basking in the glow of the latest deforestation figures and Brazil’s resurgent economy, Américo Tunes says his agency’s enforcement work has broken the historic link between growth and consumption of the rainforest. “In the presence of political will and dedication, we can cut deforestation without damaging economic growth. It is absolutely not true that you cannot.”

But Brazil is vast – about four times bigger than western Europe – and local corruption is rife. An Ibama enforcement officer tells me that the masterminds behind major deforestation are often local politicians. The legal system can be sclerotic – just 0.3% of all the 250,000 fines imposed by Ibama have been paid. And the populist calls to tear up the land in the name of development have millions of eager listeners.

Brazil is at a major fork in the road on its journey to prosperity. One path is rough, with few signposts and has never been walked by any country: the route to growth without environmental and atmospheric vandalism. The other is well paved and lit, with an easy-to-follow map. It is called business as usual, though it may very well end in a sheer drop. Success is far from assured, but Brazil appears ready to take on the hard road and prove that “environmental superpower” is not an oxymoron.

• Damian Carrington’s travel expenses were paid for by the Brazilian government. They had no say in the content of this article

• Greenpeace urges Cairn Energy to halt oil plans off Greenland
• Government says safety will be higher than for BP in US

‘Iceberg alley’, off Greenland. Environmentalists fear Cairn Energy’s exploration could cause huge ecological damage if there was an oil disaster.

Photograph: Theo Allofs/Corbis

A decision by a British oil company to start drilling wells in “iceberg alley” off Greenland has been described as “completely irresponsible” by environmental groups in the light of BP’s problems in the Gulf of Mexico.

Cairn Energy said it had begun the first of four exploration wells on the Alpha prospect in Arctic waters of up to 500m (1,600ft) having been given permission from the Greenland government.

Greenpeace said the move was wrong, not least because Cairn was a relatively small company with no harsh-conditions drilling experience that had made its name discovering oil onshore in India.

“We think it is completely irresponsible for Cairn to proceed with these operations when the US, Canada and Norway have imposed tough new restrictions on deepwater drilling until lessons can be learned about what exactly went wrong in the Gulf,” said Mads Flarup Christensen, secretary general of Greenpeace Nordic. “Drilling in these kinds of waters is very sad. It shows the way the oil industry is being forced into the last frontiers by trying to exploit tar sands and deep water.”

Greenpeace has written to Kuupik Kleist, the Greenland prime minister, urging him to call a halt to the Cairn drilling programme but admits there is little sign of its request being granted. The green group believes the country is overlooking the risks because it is desperate to find new income sources, having recently won political independence from Denmark.

The wildlife charity WWF is also concerned about the Arctic drilling. “The Gulf of Mexico is the world’s centre of drilling technology with thousands of engineers and immense resources in terms of boats, planes, control equipment and manufacturing facilities – and even here it is proving immensely difficult to handle the tragic events of the Gulf of Mexico blowout,” said Dan Barlow, its head of policy.

“It is time for countries to recognise that offshore drilling with current technology and response capability poses unacceptable risks in the Arctic, where conditions are far more extreme. The consequences of such an event in the cold climate would lead to a persistence of ecological damage over many decades.”

Cairn management recently visited the Greenland capital of Nuuk to reassure the public that it would stick to the highest possible safety standards in line with an agreement signed with the government. “Security has always been the most important in everything we do and so we want it to continue,” said commercial director Simon Thomson.

The company said today that it had put in place a very wide-ranging plan for dealing with all kinds of emergencies – including the use of two drilling units so a second could drill a relief well instantly if needed. A spokesman said the company had worked in depths of water twice as deep when it was in the Bay of Bengal and was employing staff with plenty of hard-weather experience.

Jørn Skov Nielsen, director the bureau of minerals and petroleum in Greenland, said Cairn would be working to the highest possible standards – considerably higher than was required of BP in the Gulf: “These are standard wells, not deepwater ones, but they will still be drilled to the strongest Norwegian rules and under plans we have developed over the last 10 years.”

Concerns about offshore work have been high since the Deepwater Horizon rig working for BP on the Macondo well in the Gulf blew up, and sank leaving the US with its worst ever oil spill. BP has been heavily criticised but the company and Washington are waiting to hear from a series of investigation teams exactly what went wrong and who, if anyone, was to blame. The incident caused Barack Obama to block any new deepwater wells being drilled, though this ruling has been successfully challenged in the US courts.

The new European commissioner for energy, Günther Oettinger, said this week that there should be no deepwater drilling in the North Sea, a move which has infuriated the UK oil industry.

The commission has no direct jurisdiction over British offshore waters and the UK government is unlikely to listen to this advice. Energy secretary Chris Huhne has already doubled the number of oil industry inspectors and said many more safety checks will take place in future

The first official picture of a compact version of the Range Rover are released today. Not the sort of car you would usually expect TheGreenCarWebsite.co.uk to cover, but this is a Range Rover with a difference- its CO2 emissions are expected to be below 130g/km-much less than the typically Rover with emissions around 300g/km of CO2.

An exclusive preview of the new model took place last night at a 40th birthday celebration of the Range Rover held in partnership with Vogue.

In attendance at the exclusive bash, was none other than Victoria Beckham, joined by Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, model Erin O’Connor and presenter Gabby Logan among other guests.

Named the Range Rover Evoque, this all-new coupé will join the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport line-up in the summer of 2011. It will be the smallest, lightest and most fuel efficient Range Rover ever produced. Customers have a choice of both a 4WD and a 2WD version, with emissions below 130g/km CO₂ .

Victoria Beckham, who is appointed creative design executive for the carmaker said she is “very excited” about her new position. Beckham will work on a special edition of the Evoque, and called the vehicle “absolutely stunning”. She said she was looking forward to “everything” about the collaboration, and added: “I don’t know where to start. It’s an incredible opportunity I’ve been given. I’m very excited.”

The all-new Range Rover Evoque will make its global public debut at the Paris Motor Show at the end of September and will go on sale from next summer.

Businesses and communities cash in on small-scale renewables, but some areas deemed too environmentally sensitive

This article by Dr Andrew Seidl, Head of IUCN’s Global Economics and Environment Programme, appeared recently in New Europe – the European weekly newspaper which carries news and analyses from 49 countries with a particular emphasis on EU institutions and EU-world relations.

In an era of shrinking budgets and financial challenges, no government expenditure goes without public scrutiny. Agriculture and fossil fuel subsidies, bank, steel and auto-industry bailouts, industrial accidents and natural disasters cost countries (that is, people) money and opportunity, lots of it. Environmentalists are often criticized for asking for more spending. Really, we’re calling for less spending and more investing, less waste and more opportunity. Environmentalists want improved livelihoods through better management of the planet by taking the stock and flow of ecosystem services into full account.

Public policy corrects for misaligned incentives and makes the ‘prices right’ such that better resource allocation decisions can be made. When it comes to biodiversity, the environment, the public commonweal, and the green economy, the prices are wrong by a good distance. They are wrong both due to the presence and the absence of public policy at various scales. Perverse incentives should be removed, externalities internalized (or offsets paid) and ecosystem services valued in order to reveal potential opportunity and create a level playing field where private and social incentives are well aligned. That is, full costs and benefits of resource use should be accounted for in a consistent fashion at all levels from the farm gate to the federal government.

For example, due to air pollution and other adverse external effects, market prices for fossil fuels distort the true social costs of their use. Subsidizing fossil fuels is still worse, exacerbating the ill-effects of market imperfections. Subsidized fuel is reducing the incentive to innovate and to find low or no fossil fuel options for economic development. Among other things, it has helped to fuel sprawling, automobile centered, urban design, the legacy of which will be difficult, if not economically infeasible, to reverse.

The ongoing and increasingly dire BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico clearly illustrates that the full expected costs of oil extraction are not reflected in the accountancy calculations of businesses and insurance companies. Tax payers and local communities are left to subsidize the shortsightedness of such accounting. Biodiversity, the basis for past, current, and future economic development in the region is irreversibly damaged.

In addition, the planet’s natural riches lie largely in developing nations and environmentalists understand that poverty is bad for the environment. Poverty causes people to make perfectly rational short-run decisions that result in catastrophic longer-term environmental and economic consequences. Poor people living in countries that are struggling to emerge are being asked to provide stewardship of the ‘natural treasury’ on behalf of the rest of us.

We contend that ecosystem-based adaptation and nature-based solutions can reduce poverty, create more resilient and robust resource-management systems, and improve human welfare. If biodiversity pays, biodiversity stays. As a result, incentives, such as REDD(+) and (I)PES, are all the more appropriate to encourage the stewardship of ecosystem services and globally pro-social behavior and embrace the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle.

Finally, we should be careful not to forget the power of markets and the private sector. While the GEF is an excellent step in the right direction, coordinated private sector finance for green development has hardly been tapped. Recent discussions of a Green Development Mechanism, or GDM, proposes financial mechanism to create enabling conditions for increased private sector finance to mitigate biodiversity loss, much as the CDM has done to mitigate climate change, has excellent potential to address this shortfall.

The question is not whether we can afford to take the environment into full account. We must do. The question is what costs we will have to suffer and what opportunities will be forever lost due to our delays in doing so.

How one environmental activist in Japan used manga to raise awareness of unnecessary waste caused by disposable items, such as packaging, plastic bags and wooden chopstick

Born in England and raised in Spain, Charles Ward arrived in Japan with no idea that his new profession would be a springboard to activism. However, a year and half into his work as an English conversation teacher he felt he had yet to scratch Japan’s surface, so he decided to bike the length of the country to obtain a fuller understanding of the land and its people.

During this bike adventure, Ward felt his first call to activism: the need to raise awareness around Article 9 of the Japanese constitution. Called the ‘Peace clause’, Article 9 renounces “the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes” and states that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”. At the time of Ward’s bike trip, debate was underway between pacifists who were proud of the article and those calling for it to be revised to allow incremental armament or even militarisation.

With a good understanding of Japanese traditional culture and an awareness of the country’s love for all things kawaii (cute), Ward conceived of a form of activism that tapped into the hearts and minds of the Japanese.

Using origami — Japan’s traditional paper folding craft — he began making a paper dove that he called Kyu-chan ( kyu means the number nine, and chan is a suffix used as a term of endearment.) With Kyu-chan in hand, Ward would stand on street corners asking people if they knew about Kyu-chan and Article 9 (which many did not). He found immediately that, put at ease by this kawaii character, people were willing to engage in conversation about a timely issue.

After his bike trip, Ward settled back in the city of Matsumoto to open a private English conversation school. In his day-to-day life, he began to notice the unnecessary waste caused by disposable items, such as packaging, plastic bags and wooden chopsticks.

Again he decided to invoke the power of kawaii to highlight the growing problem of one-time-use and disposable items. Ward began drawing yon-koma manga (Japanese comic strips) with plastic bags and wooden chopsticks as characters. He named them Fukuro-chan (plastic bag) and Ohashi-san ( ohashi means chopstick and san is an honorific suffix).

As a way to advertise for his English school and cut down his eco-footprint, he placed these comic strips on the back of his school’s flyer and started handing them out. Before he knew it, his school was full and the kids were eagerly awaiting the next comic strip to be released with Fukuro-chan’s adventures.

“By bringing a simple inanimate object to life, we start to appreciate the value of things and understand where things come from and where they go once their use has come to an end,” said Ward in a recent interview with Our World 2.0.

In one strip, Fukuro-chan notices a fish caught in stray plastic bag. Or is it the other way around? When Fukuro-chan pulls the bag with the fish out of the river, he is only concerned with the well-being of his fellow plastic bag, leaving the fish to say, “Hey, what about me?”

It is through these cute images and sense of humour that Ward is transforming people’s ideas about the use of everyday things around us.

“Anything [activism] that you do has to be interesting, has to be entertaining, it has to be likeable. Making Fukuro-chan had to do with the fact that everything in Japan, every project, every company has a mascot. That was the incentive to make Fukuro-chan look cute.”

While the ecological message may not seem overtly apparent in each individual comic strip — of which he has written about 50 to date — Ward believes that this approach works.

“That fact that it is accessible, the fact that it is not in-your-face, that the message is not so direct, makes people want to find out more,” he said.

“You have to make it funny and if you don’t, people won’t listen. It’s got to be entertaining and behind that there is a message people will get anyway. If they fall in love with Fukuro-chan then they won’t throw it away, right? They think maybe I shouldn’t use them, or maybe I shouldn’t take them and store them in my kitchen drawer.”

Ward’s manga strips are growing in popularity and have recently been placed in a digital display at the Parco Department store in Matusmoto and Chiba City. He has even produced a ten minute short video (see trailer above) — a love story between Fukuro-chan and mysterious red paper bag — which recently won the runner-up prize at the Matsumoto Shotengai-Eigasai film festival.

Ward has begun to sell Fukuro-chan goods on his website, such as postcards, colouring books of Fukuro-chan’s adventures, and a Fukuro-chan emblazoned tenegui (a thin, traditionally weaved Japanese cloth) made from organic cotton. For every item purchased, Ward plants a tree via the Plant A Tree Today Foundation, an organization that plants oil trees in Thailand to produce biofuel and sequester CO2. To date, Ward has planted nearly 700 trees towards a goal of 3,000.

While Ward recognizes that reduction in the use of plastic bags is the ultimate goal, he is also keenly aware that so-called reusable eco-bags are often made out of synthetic materials and are shipped in from abroad. On the back of the paper packaging of the Fukuro-chan tenugui are instructions to make a number of do-it-yourself items, including a Fukuro-chan eco-bag.

Ward is also planning to take his initiative to reduce plastic bags to the next level. He plans to approach department stores and supermarkets to convince them to keep a stash of used plastic bags available at the check-out counter for customers to use as an alternative to new bags, as well as providing a place for people to drop off their used bags for reuse. He is also starting a sticker campaign to reduce the amount of junk mail people receive.

Ultimately, Ward would like to see Fukuro-chan as popular as Hello Kitty or another all-time favourite Japanese character named Doraemon

Please see our sister site www.planetgreenbottle.com, for further solutions to the plastic problem