Two ways the world might change by 2030

If you need any more reason to feel impatient, consider this: 2014 once again set a new record as the hottest year on record, while the highest-ever levels of carbon in the atmosphere were also recorded.

So here’s a question - is today’s current political system set up to do anywhere near enough quickly enough?

Recently we held another in-house lunchtime debate in the company boardroom and there were some great contributions, as ever. The theme was how companies should be made to improve sustainability and, in the same vein, how to transform today’s sustainability efforts (because they aren’t working fast enough).

Here are two potential vision statements we’d like to share.

1. By 2030 we believe sustainability legislation will be in place that requires every established producer business to publish standardised sustainability metrics and to publish a one-number measure of organisational sustainability plus a one-number measure of product sustainability on high-impact products.
   
   
2. By 2030 we believe certain resource-intensive or key-resource products won’t be permitted to be sold at all, but will only be leased to consumers to make resource recovery and reuse easier for the accountable producer companies.

Does that sound a drastic vision for 2030? If it does now, perhaps it won’t for very long. The era of governments and legislators taking small actions around the edges of sustainability, and trumpeting the odd good-news story, will soon be behind us. By 2020, the landscape will look very different to today. And by 2030 the kind of legislation we’re suggesting here will likely not just be in place but have long since been accepted by consumers who have become well-used to managing their environmental impacts through intelligent devices responding to a constant flow of information from ever smarter products.

What do you think about the rate of progress today in sustainability? And what do you think about today’s legislation, market competition and resource scarcity, and how these factors currently intersect to shape our approaches to being sustainable in 2015?

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