Following the footprints

Carbon footprints

Following the footprints

Environment: Carbon-footprint labels, which indicate a product’s environmental impact, are quietly spreading. Consumers may not have noticed them yet, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes

DO YOU look for carbon-footprint labels on goods when shopping? If you do, you are in a small minority. The practice of adding labels to foods and other products, showing the quantity (in grams) of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with making and transporting them, began in 2007 when the world’s first such labels were applied to a handful of products sold in Britain. The idea was that carbon labels would let shoppers identify products with the smallest carbon footprints, just as other labels already indicate dolphin-friendly tuna, organic milk or Fairtrade coffee. Producers would compete to reduce the carbon footprints of their products, and consumers would be able to tell whether, for example, locally made goods really were greener than imported ones.

Carbon labels have yet to become as widely recognised by consumers as other eco-labels, however. A survey carried out in 2010 by Which?, a British consumer group, found that just a fifth of British shoppers recognised the carbon footprint label, compared with recognition rates of 82% for Fairtrade and 54% for organic labelling. This is understandable, because carbon labelling is a much more recent development—organic labelling dates back to the 1970s, and Fairtrade to the late 1980s—and the right ways to do it are still being worked out. Adding a carbon label to a product is a complex and often costly process that involves tracing its ingredients back up their respective supply chains and through their manufacturing processes, to work out their associated emissions. According to 3M, an American industrial giant that makes over 55,000 different products, this can cost $30,000 for a single product. To further confuse matters, different carbon footprinting and labelling standards have emerged in different countries, preventing direct comparisons between the various types of label.

Even so, proponents of carbon labels now see encouraging signs of progress. In Britain, a pioneer in carbon labelling, nine out of ten households bought products with carbon labels last year, albeit mostly unwittingly, and total sales of such products exceeded £2 billion ($3.1 billion). This exceeded the total sales of organic products (£1.5 billion) or Fairtrade products (£800m) and is largely due to the addition by Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, of carbon labels to more than 100 of its own-brand products, including pasta, milk, orange juice and toilet paper. (Tesco said in 2007 that it would put carbon labels on every one of the 70,000 products it sells; so far it has managed to label 500 products.)

Footprinting’s first steps“In the last 12 months, carbon footprinting has become common currency,” says Harry Morrison of the Carbon Trust, a consultancy funded by the British government which has footprinted more than 5,000 products worldwide, from building materials to pharmaceuticals. Similar carbon-labelling initiatives have been launched in many countries, measurement techniques are gradually being formalised and a global standard is in the works. Although consumers have yet to embrace the idea, the quiet spread of carbon labels is being driven by companies, which have come to see the value of determining the carbon footprints of their products.

The earliest carbon-footprint labels, which appeared in 2007, indicated the promise of the idea but also highlighted the complexity of making it work. Among the first products to have carbon labels applied were the cheese-and-onion potato crisps made by Walkers, a brand owned by PepsiCo, which were found by the Carbon Trust to have a footprint of 75 grams per packet. This figure, printed on the packet with the Carbon Trust’s “black footprint” logo, included the emissions associated with growing the potatoes, turning them into crisps, packaging them, delivering them to shops and disposing of the packaging after use. National averages were used to calculate the transport and disposal emissions.

It is not so much the label itself that matters, but the process that must be gone through to create it.

Carbon labels need not just measure carbon-dioxide emissions. Where appropriate, emissions of other greenhouse gases, such as nitrous-oxide from soils and methane emissions from animals, are also taken into account. These are turned into “carbon-dioxide equivalent” emissions using suitable conversion factors: 1g of methane is commonly taken to have the same global-warming potential as 21g of carbon dioxide, for example.

The process of calculating the carbon footprint for Walkers crisps revealed an unexpected opportunity to save energy. It turned out that because Walkers was buying its potatoes by gross weight, farmers were keeping their potatoes in humidified sheds to increase the water content. Walkers then had to fry the sliced potatoes for longer to drive out the extra moisture. By switching to buying potatoes by dry weight, Walkers could reduce frying time by 10% and farmers could avoid the cost of humidification. Both measures saved money and energy and reduced the carbon footprint of the final product.

The value of carbon footprinting and labelling lies in identifying these sorts of savings, rather than informing consumers or making companies look green. According to a report issued in 2009 by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, in England, “the main benefits of carbon labelling are likely to be incurred not via communication of emissions values to consumers, but upstream via manufacturers looking for additional ways to reduce emissions.” It is not so much the label itself that matters, in other words, but the process that must be gone through to create it. Walkers has reduced the footprint of its crisps by 7% since the introduction of its first carbon labels. Indeed, to use the Carbon Trust’s label, companies must do more than just measure the footprint of a product: they must commit themselves to reducing it.

Another of the early products to receive a carbon label was a shampoo sold by Boots, a British pharmacy chain. Shampoo is an example of a product where the footprint associated with using the product—the so-called “use phase” emissions—can be comparable to, or even greater than, the manufacturing footprint. Initially, says Mr Morrison, the Carbon Trust’s carbon labels did not include use-phase emissions, because these can vary enormously depending on consumer behaviour. The emissions associated with a bottle of shampoo depend on how long you spend in the shower, how hot the water is and what sort of boiler you have.

For many products, in short, the manufacturing footprint does not give the full picture. This is particularly true for electrical goods that are designed to use less energy. Improving energy-efficiency often involves more elaborate manufacturing processes that increase the product’s manufacturing footprint. But in use, such products use less energy, so their overall footprint, considered over their entire life cycle, is smaller. A good example is flat-screen LCD televisions compared with old-style cathode-ray-tube models. “The energy consumption in use has got much better, but the manufacturing process has got more complicated,” says Mr Morrison. As a result, the Carbon Trust’s carbon labels now include use-phase emissions. These are estimated by making statistical assumptions about consumer behaviour.

For some goods, customer behaviour can make a dramatic difference to the use-phase emissions. A life cycle analysis carried out for Levi Strauss, an American maker of casual wear, found that 57% of the carbon footprint of its 501 jeans was due to the emissions associated with washing them—assuming, that is, that the jeans were washed in warm water and machine-dried. Washing them in cold water and drying them on a line, however, reduces the use-phase emissions by 90%. Adding this sort of information to product labels can encourage buyers to minimise the use-phase emissions—but only if they actually read the label and act on its advice.

Given such wide variations, so-called “product category” rules are needed to ensure comparability between carbon labels on similar products. Those product-category rules, in turn, must be harmonised between countries to ensure compatibility between carbon-labelling schemes, which are growing in number and diversity.

In Japan the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry launched a calculation and labelling programme in 2008 which has signed up more than 300 retailers and manufacturers. As part of this scheme METI has established product-category rules for 53 products. South Korea’s environment ministry has introduced a “CooL label”, now sported by over 220 products, including furniture, rice and consumer electronics. In Thailand the government is piloting labels on 65 products from T-shirts to ceramic tiles, and is developing product-category rules for rice, textiles and chicken. Other labels have been launched in America, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden.

But the country that is now making the running is France. Casino, a French retail chain, introduced carbon labels on 100 of its own-brand products in 2008 and has since added labels to another 400 items. Its Carbon Index labels show the carbon footprint per 100g of final product (use-phase emissions are not included). E. Leclerc, another French retailer, has pioneered two novel twists on carbon labelling in a handful of its stores. It has fixed labels to store shelves showing the carbon emissions per kilogram of produce next to the usual price tags showing cost per kilogram. And by roughly estimating the carbon footprints of 20,000 of its products (by dividing them into 600 generic categories) it can produce a total footprint for an entire trolley of goods that appears on the store receipt. Signs show consumers how their trolley’s footprint compares with the average.

The French exception

These initiatives by French retailers are being backed by government action. A year-long experiment will begin in July, involving 168 firms in a range of industries, to apply carbon labels to products including clothing, furniture and cleaning products. An accompanying campaign will try to raise awareness of carbon labels among consumers. This is a prelude to the planned introduction of compulsory carbon-labelling rules, possibly as soon as 2012, which will apply to imported goods as well as those made in France. The new rules, devised by AFNOR, the French Standards Agency, require labels to show more than just the carbon footprint. Depending on the product category, they must also include other environmental data, such as the product’s water footprint and impact on biodiversity. Product-category rules have already been drawn up by AFNOR and the French environment ministry for shoes, wood, furniture, shampoo and fabric chairs. The project is the result of Grenelle 2, a law passed in 2010 which marks the first time a government has tried to make environmental labelling mandatory.

Engaging suppliers is vital. Many firms control only a small part of their products’ footprints.

Other European countries will be watching the French experiment closely, not least because their own exporters may soon have to adhere to the French rules. Inevitably this has led to calls for a European standard for carbon labelling. Last year the European Commission asked Ernst & Young, a consultancy, to evaluate and compare the various footprinting schemes in use in Europe. It found wide variation between them. “We are definitely at the early stage,” says Eric Mugnier, E&Y’s director of environment and sustainability. Not all carbon-labelling schemes are verified by independent third parties, for example, or include use-phase emissions. The European Commission’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability is about to launch an analysis of footprinting methods.

Meanwhile, efforts to refine and harmonise carbon footprinting and labelling at a global level are advancing. Britain’s standard, called PAS 2050, which was published in 2008, is highly regarded and has influenced standard-setting elsewhere. In France, Casino is adjusting its footprinting methodology to bring it into line with PAS 2050 by including use-phase emissions, for example. The British standard has also helped shape the two global product-footprinting standards that are now in the works: ISO 14067, being drawn up by the International Organisation for Standardisation, based in Geneva, and the GHG Protocol, a project backed by two environmental lobby groups, the World Resources Institute and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

The ISO standard is expected to be finalised in 2012, and the GHG Protocol standards will be released in September. Co-operation between the two bodies should ensure that their standards are highly compatible. “The marketplace is asking for one standard—not different ways in different countries. Otherwise, it becomes a trade barrier,” says Pankaj Bhatia, director of the GHG Protocol. There will still be details to fill in. But the movement towards a global set of standards is clear.

That will be reassuring for companies worried about multiple sets of standards and a growing carbon-counting bureaucracy. The difficult part remains, however: working with their networks of suppliers to determine, and then reduce, the carbon footprints of their products. This is a tricky area, says Mr Morrison, because suppliers may worry that revealing information about their processes for carbon-measurement purposes “becomes a back door to a debate about price”. Yet engaging suppliers is vital, because many firms have direct control over only a small part of their products’ footprints. Gold’n Plump Poultry, a large American chicken producer, found that its own operations accounted for just 22% of the footprint of each chicken; 50% of the footprint came from the production of corn- and soya-based chicken feed.

For some firms, such as food companies and retailers, the lion’s share of their emissions takes the form of these “indirect” emissions produced elsewhere. Tesco, for example, reckons its supply chain produces ten times the emissions of its direct operations (heating and lighting stores and offices, and so forth), and that consumer emissions may be ten times as big again. Similarly, Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, estimates that 90% of its emissions emanate from its supply chain of over 120,000 companies.

Only by working closely with suppliers, and encouraging them to collaborate and pool expertise, will it be possible to streamline the footprinting process and label hundreds or thousands of products, says David North, director of corporate affairs at Tesco. His firm is working with Unilever, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, under the auspices of the Consumer Goods Forum, an industry body, to make carbon measurement easier for suppliers. “The process has to be simplified for us and others to get to scale,” he says.

Existing footprinting standards already allow for some simplification. Emissions from building factories or manufacturing capital equipment are not included, for example.“We have tried to strike a pragmatic balance, to do this in enough detail that you can find efficiencies and inform consumers, but not go to the extreme that this is so expensive that it can’t be deployed at scale,” says Mr Morrison.

Dieter Helm, an energy-policy expert at the University of Oxford, proposes a colour-coded scheme that lets consumers see which products in a given category have bigger-than-average footprints, and which have smaller-than-average footprints. Unlike precise figures in grams, this would be easier for consumers to understand and for companies to compile. And arguments between retailers and suppliers about whose products were greener would helpfully raise consumer awareness, he says.

The power of the label

Given the international nature of many supply chains, the process of working out products’ carbon footprints is also helping to change the way carbon emissions are reckoned. Rather than totting up national totals, it makes more sense to think about cross-border carbon flows. “This helps you understand our emissions are happening around the world,” says Mr Morrison.

Between 1990 and 2008, for example, European Union countries reduced total carbon emissions in their own territories by 6%. But this improvement was almost exactly cancelled out by the extra emissions associated with goods imported into the EU from China, according to a recent study by Glen Peters at the Centre for International Climate and Environment Research, in Oslo, and his colleagues. Add in other imports of such “embodied” carbon emissions from other countries, and Europe’s overall carbon emissions actually increased by 6% over that period.

By getting firms to assess and reduce the emissions of products with imported inputs, however, carbon footprinting gives firms in the rich world a motive to cut emissions in the developing world, through efficiencies and investment in clean technologies. Carbon labels promise to make carbon footprints and carbon flows visible. But making them work on a large scale will involve striking the right balance between accuracy and practicality.

Carbon offsets

The offset option

EXTRA leg room, travel insurance, space in the hold for a suitcase: all of these are available to the airline passenger seeking to mitigate the anxieties of travel, for an extra fee in most cases.

What about carbon offsets? Some carriers offer them, including Virgin and Continental, which ranked first and second respectively in Greenopia’s recent rankings of “greenest airlines”. But it’s not common practice; with Continental you have to dig around the website for the option, and even for Virgin, that four-leaf ranking has much to do with the relative newness of the fleet, and its corresponding efficiency.

Carbon offsets would not be huge moneymakers for the airlines, and it’s not clear that they would be much of a draw for travellers either. “Commercial flight, to my mind, is such an enviro-no-no that it's tough to get my head around the fact that choosing one airline over the next makes a difference,” writes Jeff Nield at Treehugger. That’s a popular view among environmentally minded travellers. Two years ago, for example, Responsible Travel, an adventure tourism company, announced that it was cutting its offsetting option on the grounds that offsets give people an incentive to be cavalier about their consumption.

Still, it would seem that if consumers want carbon offsets at all, they will want them at the same time as their tickets. If you want to buy offsets via TerraPass, for example, you have to make a separate task of it, and estimate your consumption. The transaction costs would be lower if you could add the offset with the click of a button and eliminate the guesswork. And if part of the point of offsetting is to send a message—that as a consumer, you’re willing to pay to mitigate your environmental impacts—offsets from airlines are a direct way to do that.

I recently raised the question with Bob Jordan, the vice-president for strategy and planning at Southwest Airlines, and now the president of AirTran Airways following its acquisition by Southwest. The offset option would seem to be a natural fit for Southwest, which has heavily promoted its decision not to charge for bag fees, but does offer a variety of add-ons, like early check-in and pet transportation. Mr Jordan said the carrier had considered offering carbon offsets, but concluded that they were kind of gimmicky; at the European carriers, for example, offset options simply don’t get that many takers. Southwest had decided to adopt other environmental measures instead. For example, it outfitted its whole fleet with rounded winglets. These are expensive, but improve aerodynamics so as to reduce fuel consumption by 3-4%—no bad thing when airlines have been hammered lately by high fuel costs. (Southwest was one of the few to post a profit in the first quarter, albeit a wafer-thin $5m on $3.1 billion in revenue.) Another example of one of the truths about environmentalism: motives may be worthy, but you see the biggest efforts to reduce emissions when the markets make the case for it.

Incidentally, the question of ancillary revenues is an interesting one. A new study from the Amadeus IT Group finds that airlines brought in $22 billion from add-on fees last year, up nearly 40% from 2009. Southwest has done well on ancillary revenue too, even though it doesn’t charge bag fees or change fees, two of the biggest moneymakers. That may seem to be at odds with the airline’s expressed philosophy. (“We’re not about getting you a poor experience on the airplane, or nickel and diming you for everything,” said Mr Jordan.) But perhaps Southwest’s options strike passengers as genuinely optional—early check-in, for example, or WiFi on some flights. Those fees don’t annoy passengers in the way that charging them for a soda does.

A preference for green

A preference for green

So long as it doesn’t cost too much

Relief from the big dry

AUSTRALIANS LIVE CLOSE to nature. Not on the face of things, it’s true: since three-quarters of them inhabit cities of over 100,000 people, they would seem to be well insulated from their natural surroundings. Most have probably never seen a koala or a platypus outside the zoo; many won’t often come across a kangaroo. But for Sydneysiders, say, the chances of meeting a venomous snake or even a deadly spider are not trivial. And above all, literally, is the weather, benign and beautiful much of the time, but often by turns scorching, soaking, dehydrating, burning, blowing, parching, cyclonic, cancer-causing and generally destructive.

Watch our video-guide to Australia's past, present and future, or listen to an interviewwith the author of this Special Report

That may be one reason why Australians seem especially concerned about the environment. Another, if they are informed, is their awareness that one of their finest natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef, is under threat from pollution, overfishing and the warming of the sea; to Australians the reef is a source of pride, not to mention $5 billion a year from tourists. Indeed, many parts of the natural world are under threat in Australia. About 40 animal species, it is said, have disappeared there in the past 500 years, and hundreds more are vulnerable.

That is partly because Australia is an ancient continent with all sorts of ancient creatures. Some of the microbes that built the strange rock-like structures of Shark Bay in Western Australia, for instance, trace their genes back 1.9 billion years, though the structures themselves, called stromatolites, go back only 2,000 or 3,000 years. As an old continent, Australia has fragile soil, which the country’s indigenous animals treat with respect, preferring on the whole to bounce on it rather than to stomp. The sheep, horses, goats and pigs brought by Europeans, however, have hard hooves, which compress the thin soil and cause erosion. Some of the beasts that have been introduced, such as foxes, eat the native species, or their food, and many imported plants prove invasive and overwhelm the locals.

To many Australians, these droughts and storms seem to have become more frequent and violent, and some people are inclined to blame global warming. Insurers are worried, and farmers wonder whether they may need new crops if the climate really is changing. State governments have already built long-term drought into some of their calculations, for instance, by building desalination plants to provide fresh water. Every state capital except Hobart now has at least one, at huge cost.And then there is the climate. No one knows whether it is really changing or, if so, whether man is playing a part. Australia has more than its share of climate-change sceptics, and they can point to the many droughts, cyclones and floods that have afflicted the country for centuries. Indisputably, though, these visitations do much more damage than before, because they affect more people and more man-made creations. The floods that inundated towns, ports, railways and coal mines last December and January may have cost the economy about $13 billion, it was said in January, and that was before Cyclone Yasi swept through, adding another $800m to the bill. The government has said it will spend $5.6 billion to help repair the damage, of which $1.8 billion will come from a levy on higher-earning taxpayers.

Yet another reason for being green is that Australia is not. When it comes to producing greenhouse gases it is almost in a class by itself: only the United Arab Emirates gives off more per person. Three-quarters of the emissions come from producing and using energy, especially electricity, which is largely generated from coal, much of it dirty, brown lignite. Coal is plentiful and therefore cheap, which helps to explain why Australia is prosperous. But many Australians feel vulnerable to climate change and think they need a carbon policy.

A sensible one would raise the price of coal-fired generation enough to make cleaner, plentiful natural gas an economic alternative. Australia will soon require more electricity, but no one wants to invest in new plants, or indeed other forms of energy, without knowing whether or how much carbon will be taxed. Both the main parties have at times accepted the need for cuts in emissions, and the current government has committed Australia to reduce its carbon pollution to 5%, maybe more, below 2000 levels by 2020. Since an increasingly resource-based economy will produce ever more emissions, even 5% would be a bigger cut than it looks, though the Greens want 25%.

The topic is fraught. On becoming prime minister in 2007, Mr Rudd, who had in opposition called climate change “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time”, ratified the Kyoto protocol (disdained by Mr Howard) as his first official act, and put a trading scheme for carbon emissions before parliament. In the face of falling polls and rising opposition, however, he abruptly dropped it. His successor, Ms Gillard, having vowed during the 2010 election campaign that there would be “no carbon tax under the government I lead”, has now said she will introduce one. Her plan is to fix a price for carbon for three to five years, after which a trading scheme will take over. The details remain to be settled, but the idea is that transport, energy and industry will be included, though farming will not.

Whether it will ever come about is uncertain. The Liberal Party, under its previous leader, Malcolm Turnbull, supported a trading scheme, but that support cost him his job. The man who got it, Tony Abbott, had also once been a backer of such a scheme, but then decided it was a “great big tax on everything”. He is now adamantly opposed, knowing that many in his party are climate-change sceptics and sensing votes from those who would be hit by a carbon tax. What he himself believes is unclear: he has declared the science to be “crap”, but even so vowed last year to spend $3.2 billion over four years to secure emissions cuts. The fate of the scheme may lie with the Greens, who help keep Ms Gillard’s minority government in power. In 2009 they voted against Mr Rudd’s scheme, saying it was too feeble. They may find this one no better, yet to reject it would be to invite charges of irresponsibility.

Droughts and flooding rains

If carbon emissions are the new worry for Australians, water is the old one. For millennia, the country has been shaped by water, or the lack of it. Some 85% of the population live within 50km of the coast, largely because no rivers run reliably in the middle of the continent. No wonder that for the homesick poet, Dorothea Mackellar, her homeland was “a sunburnt country,/A land of sweeping plains,/Of ragged mountain ranges,/Of droughts and flooding rains.” Not long before she wrote those lines, a century ago, drought had been one of the factors bringing the states to federation. Water nearly put a stop to the talks.

The issue then was the allocation of water in the Murray-Darling basin. This is the swathe from Queensland down through New South Wales and Victoria to South Australia where 65% of the country’s irrigated farms produce 40% of its agricultural output, all watered by the Murray and Darling rivers or their tributaries. The rivers satisfy the thirst not just of the 10% of the population who live in this basin, but also of many town-dwellers and farmers outside it; the city of Adelaide, for example, depends on the Murray for about 40% of its water. But the slow-moving Darling is often dry, and sometimes even the perkier Murray does not reach the sea. The ensuing influx of salt water at its mouth has troubled South Australians ever since 1887.

Down under down under

Now the main worry is the health of the river. For the past two years water has flowed in plenty; torrents have surged down riverbeds that had been dry for years, flushing out accumulations of salt and detritus. Birds have returned to nesting places unvisited for years; plants and trees have blossomed and flourished. But the ten years of drought before this efflorescence followed a huge expansion of irrigation in the 1970s and 1980s that reduced the flow of the Murray to a trickle. South Australia, with the least rainfall and at the end of the line, had been hit hardest, and began trading water allocations in the 1980s. The practice caught on elsewhere, helping the farmers of the basin to get through the recent long drought using far less water than before yet with no reduction in output. Their example is held up to would-be water traders all over the world.

The trouble is that, though the farmers got through the drought all right, the environment did not, certainly not in the southern part of the basin where so little rain fell. The flow of the river, made constant by careful management to please consumers, did not suit the handsome river red gum trees along its banks, which thrive on drought and flood. And despite dredging, salinity was becoming a problem. Many feared it would soon become impossible to hold back the sea.

In 2007, however, the Howard government passed an act that allowed it to muscle in on water management in the Murray-Darling basin, constitutionally a state responsibility. A set of proposals is now in the making that would reduce the extraction of water available for consumers by up to a third. As with the carbon scheme, the outcome is in doubt. Water users along the line of the river are protesting furiously. But the fuss is probably overdone. The lesson of Australia’s water management is that there is enough water to go round. No one likes paying for it but, in places of shortest supply, where they pay most, people use it carefully. In Victoria much irrigation is inefficient. Parts of New South Wales could also adopt less wasteful methods. But arid Adelaide recycles over 30% of its water, and to its south, the vineyards of McLaren Vale are irrigated with the city’s waste water. Australia has produced some of its biggest agricultural crops in times of greatest drought. It should be capable of sharing the water so that human beings, animals and plants all have enough.

If water is mainly a problem for people in the country, it does not mean that city-dwellers are unconcerned about their surroundings. People in the main cities now have enough water, thanks to desalination, though they still have to pay for it. And they have other concerns. The poor state of public transport and infrastructure generally played a large part in the ejection of Labor governments in New South Wales in March and in Victoria last November. The price of housing is another political issue, reflecting the pressure of rising numbers of people in the state capitals, where migrants make up about a third of the population. Increasingly, though, Australians want new buildings to be green.

Melbourne has led the way. Its City Council House 2, with windows that open at night to take in air that cools the interior by day, was the first public building in Australia to get a six-star green rating. Like other buildings, it has been designed as part of an effort to create a good street, which it is hoped will make a good city. In Melbourne that also means good lanes, arcades and frontages, many of which were built in the 19th century and had fallen into decrepitude. They have now been restored, helping to lure people back to the centre. The city’s planners believe Melbourne’s population will more than double from its current 4m to 8m by 2050. Rob Adams, the director of city design, thinks this could be accommodated using only 7½% of the land within the existing metropolitan area. But it would mean, if not a city of high-rise living, then buildings of several storeys.

Admiral Arthur Phillip, the man who brought the First Fleet into Sydney Harbour in 1788, ended his days tumbling out of an upstairs window in England. It would never have happened if he had stayed in Australia, for Australia is still the land of the bungalow. That’s the way people like to live, and why they say Sydney, Australia’s most crowded city, is already full up. Yet its population density is lower than that of Los Angeles. If they really mean to be green, Aussies will have to start going upstairs.

Pricing the priceless

NATURE has a value, but is it possible to put a number on it? A new report commissioned by Defra, called the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, has tried to do just that, estimating how much the natural environment contributes to the British economy. Insect pollination of crops is worth £430m a year, according to the study, while inland wetlands benefit water quality by up to £1.5 billion.

The report, carried out by ecologists, economists and sociologists, follows a growing trend for trying to put numbers on nature. This was what the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change did in 2006. Similarly, a United Nations report last year estimated the global cost of damaging the natural environment.

The logic is that by putting a figure on the cost of degrading the planet's natural assets, they will be included in political calculations. If the environment is not ascribed a value, the risk is that the cost of damaging it is ignored. This sort of exercise should allow decision makers to prioritise more rationally.

The ambition to make people appreciate the natural world—and so seek to protect it—is laudable. Human life—intensive farming, densely populated cities—puts pressure on ecosystems. Climate change will only increase that. This new attempt to price nature should now feed in to a forthcoming white paper on the natural environment which Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, will produce later this year. 

One of the features of the UN report on the global environment was that that the range of its estimate was $2,500bn—so great as to be almost meaningless. But it is hard to be comfortable about any exact figure too, and some of the numbers in this report seem to me curiously precise—for example, that the health benefits of living with a view of green space are worth up to £300 per person per year.

Though the study talks about the “free services” that nature brings, it holds back from quantifying the overall value of this green and pleasant land. Instead, it looks at six future scenarios of sustainability and growth, and tries to map how ecosystems might be affected over the next 50 years. An unfettered drive for growth could result in an overall loss of £20.6 billion a year, it estimates, through increased emissions and a loss of green space.

Even broad estimates can help sensible decision-making. And in the long term, protecting the natural environment should cost less than depleting its resources—as well as allowing man to reap the benefits of the natural world for longer.