The prime minister’s net-zero gamble is the final straw in a shambolic period for those striving for a sustainable food system. But companies slowing up on sustainability is the bigger worry, says David Burrows.
The chaotic Conservative governments of recent years will long be remembered for many things, but for me memories of Boris (Johnson), Liz (Truss) and even Rishi (Sunak) will be in their desire to reduce everything to a slogan. Get. Brexit. Done.
Which is probably why, on listening to Sunak last week pull apart the government’s net-zero commitments as if they could easily be met with next-to-zero green policies, three words sprang to mind. They began with: WTF?
Sunak was standing behind a lectern that read: “Long-term decisions for a better future.” He talked, as he often does when climate change is the topic, about his daughters – “our children”. “The real choice confronting us is do we really want to change our country and build a better future for our children, or do we want to carry on as we are. I have made my decision: we are going to change,” he said in a speech on his approach to net-zero.
You could have been forgiven for thinking this was a speech about more ambitious environmental rules, investment and policymaking. But the ‘something’ Sunak is doing involves changing direction; actually slowing down policies designed to reduce emissions. Good old ‘green Brexit’.
Only in June had the Climate Change Committee (CCC) sifted through 3,000 pages of new detail regarding the government’s net-zero plans and concluded that progress had stalled. “World leading” is how Sunak described the progress, suggesting in fact the UK was moving too fast to cut emissions. What happens to a leader when they slow down, though?
He hadn’t yet done the maths but CCC chair professor Piers Forster was “concerned” by the news. In order to hit the 68% reduction target by 2030, the recent rate of annual emissions reduction outside the electricity supply sector must “quadruple”, his committee warned in the summer. And that means we have to consider policies to drive down emissions from food. And resources. (And many other things besides). Sunak doesn’t have any solutions, though. His argument for halting work on net-zero boils down to: neither did Boris.
On this he has a point. Targets are easily set but hard to meet. Just ask the Scottish government that should have banned landfilling of biodegradable waste two years ago and now looks in danger of not meeting its revised deadline in a couple of years’ time. Or look at England’s terrible performance on recycling in recent years.
Michael Gove, who as environment secretary breathed life into Defra, set out grand plans in his resources and waste strategy (2018), together with ambitious targets. Even NGOs like WWF, smitten by the husky-hugging David Cameron before being crapped on, were convinced that this was a Conservative keen on conservation. Five years on and the strategy has fallen apart.
Following delays to everything from deposit return schemes to extended producer responsibility for packaging – not to mention a lame voluntary-led approach to waste prevention (which let’s not forget, as policymakers clearly have, sits at the top of the hierarchy) – Sunak delivered the final nail to the strategy’s coffin, which will now rest in peace in a landfill somewhere. Or failing that it’ll be incinerated.
The seven bins of Sunak
“The proposal that we should force you to have seven different bins in your home,” he said, “I’ve scrapped it.” The mention of bins certainly made the right wing press sit up and listen (and ignore the fact that this was never a policy in the first place: the policy was to streamline recycling collections for homes and businesses to make recycling easier, which is a good idea).
Sunak also proudly announced that he is scrapping “the proposal to make you change your diet – and harm British farmers – by taxing meat”. Which was also never a thing. Sure, it has some support among campaigners and academia – and even if polls are to be believed a fair number of consumers – but it was politically unpalatable. Totally. “Nobody serious in politics was talking about banning flying, taxing meat, etc,” Conservative MP Simon Clarke told the BBC, accusing the prime minister of listing “a lot of straw men” that were not ever government policy.
Indeed, if further proof were needed that Sunak has no interest in food policy it was in this reference to a meat tax – an intervention that was even ruled out by Henry Dimbleby in his national food strategy. “I think if you were to put a meat tax on now a government wouldn’t survive a week,” he said last year (Ministers have totally ignored almost all of Dimbleby’s other proposals, so it is hardly surprising he has since quit his role as the government’s food tsar after spending the best part of two years working on his review).
Whether Sunak’s intervention to seemingly sideline the country’s most pressing sustainability challenges is the death of him remains to be seen. At much the same time as Sunak was delivering his speech, over in New York at a climate ambition summit, António Guterres was offering his latest assessment of where we are now on tackling global warming. “Humanity has opened the gates to hell,” said the UN secretary general. Not warming. Not heating. Not boiling. But hell.
Guterres’ speech was as sobering as Sunak’s was nonsensical. He also talked of “hope” and here there was a nod to the private sector in his closing remarks at the summit. “What we have seen today is that there are companies, and there are asset owners and other financial institutions that are already aligning their strategies or their portfolios with a 1.5°C strategy. And if these first-doers and first-movers can do it, everybody can do it.”
So let me finish with a concern and then a challenge.
The UK, and indeed many other developed countries, has net-zero aspirations but very few policies to reach even the reductions required by 2030 – especially in huge impact but hard-to-abate sectors like food. This is why Sunak has chickened out: he talked about it not being easy but showed no desire to help work through the pain. Some companies are beginning to show similar signs of antipathy.
Some have been forced into ‘greenhushing’ by over-zealous campaigners who call out everything as greenwashing –which will prove more poisonous than they realise. Others have awakened, like Sunak, to the fact that a net-zero commitment is not just for COP, or indeed just scopes 1 and 2, or for that matter ‘well below 2°C’. All scopes, including 3, have to be included and 1.5°C has to be the target. Those reconfiguring their plans and being transparent about it should be applauded; as should those who admit their 2030 reductions will be a stretch but are seeking ways, and investing money, in finding solutions. There is comfort in knowing other companies are struggling with this too, and my hope is that this will lead to greater collaboration, which in turn will only cut costs. (And collaboration is needed more than ever after the government decided to water down its mandatory environmental data reporting regime).
However, there are a worrying number of companies who are happy to keep their heads down and follow our country’s leader. Among the world’s 500 largest companies there has been no increase in 2030 emissions reduction commitments in the last year and 34% still remain without any climate commitments, according to research published last week by Climate Impact Partners. The analysis showed that those setting targets have reduced emissions while emissions across those without any targets have risen. Indeed, scopes 1 and 2 emissions increased by 1.5% overall. Companies that reduced reported emissions year-over-year earned on average nearly $1bn more in profit than their Fortune Global 500 peers. Yet only around half are reporting scope 3, which account for 90% of the total emissions across the Fortune 500.
Go figure
The Science-based targets initiative (SBTi) dashboard also shows that 124 companies are tagged with the new unwanted badge of ‘commitment removed’. Some could be the result of company closures or mergers, a spokesperson explained to me, but commitments have also been withdrawn (the SBTi has had its own credibility issues of late which it is trying to address). The other reason is that “the company did not submit targets within the commitment time-frame (24 months after committing) and/or did not reach successful validation of their targets according to their commitment”. Did they just quietly quit?
The shift towards net-zero has been empowering but also daunting. But I remain convinced that businesses can and will change. In the face of the current political (inaction on) climate, we all have to do battle with our anxieties and remain optimistic because there is hope.
Some caterers, in particular, have set out robust science-based targets and are working on reductions right now – and across all three scopes. In some I have seen transparency. In others inspiration. And in a sub-sector of the food industry which lacks consumer-facing brands, these companies don’t often receive the credit they are due. Or equally they don’t pursue praise for removing plastic straws, creating plant-forward menus, adopting electric vehicles for employees and fleets, or simply switching to renewable energy.
But this is crunch time. As Time magazine noted last week in a piece about the language of climate change: “Ultimately, what we call climate change doesn’t matter. The storms and volatility, extreme weather and temperature creep that are characteristic of it have been with us for more than five decades now. Words didn’t cause the problem and words won’t clean it up. That’s a job for us all.”
So, for those still fighting for a sustainable – and I mean that in the widest sense – future that includes nutritious, affordable, low-impact and accessible food I offer these three words: Don’t. Give. Up.
