And who won the Mystery Map competition? Find out here.

It’s what makes us at Geofutures tick, of course: the fact that presenting information visually on a map makes it totally accessible. It works with the way our minds work.

And so we had great times discussing mapping with all kinds of interesting people – and it started some interesting thoughts flowing about the kinds of data people need and the forms they need it in. More on that soon.

The event is design to showcase the most up to date technologies, new approaches and collaborations, promote equipment and services and introduce companies committed to low carbon commerce (more details here). Geofutures MD Mark Thurstain-Goodwin is also speaking in a symposium session discussing fresh perspectives on energy efficiency, together with Dave Covell, principal at ENVIRON.

See you there!

And yes, working with corporate clients means there are fewer hours in the day to do things like our own sustainability research or write a blog, but in the end these things all connect.

I’ve long argued to anyone who’ll listen that adapting the established economy is at the very centre of achieving sustainability. Only by going mainstream and involving major companies will the important work of environmental researchers and campaigners have impact at the scale necessary to make a difference.

Ten years ago I helped develop an index of economic diversity for a government client. Taking inspiration from natural systems, it worked on the basis that a resilient economic system had greater diversity and hence ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

So it’s good to see that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation has adopted similar thinking into their education aims. Sailing around the world alone is an extreme way of realising how we have to live within finite resources, but now Ellen MacArthur’s journey is all about bringing businesses and educators together to design an economy which treats waste as inputs and diversity as strength.

I like the neatness of the term the Foundation is using for this: the circular economy. Again mimicking natural systems, it suggests that intelligent upfront planning and design can ensure all waste products are treated as inputs to something else, and that ‘technical nutrients’ don’t enter the biosphere but are recycled or better still re-engineered.

There is no disconnect. Major corporates want to ensure their long-term existence as much as anyone, and some will act sooner rather than later. Third-sector organisations will benefit, and will circulate their knowledge and expertise back again. Natural systems will influence our thinking and help to bring us full circle.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

See the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website

It’s official – sustainability is no longer a brand issue or evidence of corporate social responsibility: it’s a key business driver.

We’re already directing our insight and analysis offer towards helping organisations make well informed long-term sustainability decisions, but it’s always nice to have your convictions reaffirmed. Companies aren’t investing in this field because they want to be seen to be green, but because it makes sound business sense, and that’s what will keep it going.

So here’s a short selection of views I’ve come across about why sustainability is central to business. What also emerges, of course, is that business is central to sustainability. Green campaigners have kept the torch alight for decades, but it will take the mass momentum of the business economy to make a difference at the scale that’s required.

“The scales literally fell from my eyes, and it was so obvious that any business which focuses on the things that are important to its customers will not be wasting resources anywhere in its business, as any unit of waste is one less unit of resource. The whole logic that smart business is a sustainable business came through in spades. Never mind the science; what business is about is being ruthlessly effective delivering value to our customers, and that must be about stripping out inefficiency of any kind. Why would you knowingly waste the resources of the Earth?” Ronan Dunne, Chief Executive, O2 UK

“For Addison Lee, it’s always been about the commercial benefits – more than the green agenda. We made the company more efficient, and as a result, its carbon footprint kept shrinking. It was a series of steps, starting with simple things like fitting windows with high insulation ratings. Our ‘green’ action plan said to put better windows on the first floor, but the cost benefits were so clear that we did the whole building.” John Griffin, CEO, Addison Lee

“Doing the right thing on climate change saves money, retains customers, creates new market opportunity and takes you beyond just compliance. It reduces your risk exposure and reduces risk to shareholders.” Dr Jonathan Foot, Chief Environmental Officer, EDF Energy

“Think about it…if we throw it away, we had to buy it first. So we pay twice, once to get it, once to have it taken away. What if we reverse that cycle? What if our suppliers send us less, and everything they send us has value as a recycled product? No waste, and we get paid instead.” Lee Scott, Chief Executive, Wal-Mart

“Business is the force of change. Business is essential to solving the climate crisis, because this is what business is best at: innovating, changing, addressing risks, searching for opportunities. There is no more vital task.” Richard Branson

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin

Ruth Keily

As we wait to see what the comprehensive spending review brings us, I’ve been struck by the different responses to the funding cuts among the various government departments, quangos, non-profits and others we meet and work alongside.

Some have a touch of fatalism. “There’s no money in food,” sighed one experienced campaigner in the sector this month. Supermarket profit figures flickered through my mind, but I knew he was talking about funding for food security research.

Major supermarket chains may grow more interested in this as their supplies become unaffordable, but it’s currently the domain of campaigners and environmental researchers and it’s certainly true that government investment is hard to come by.

Others seem to be quietly getting on with things, remaining committed to their objectives and hoping they can still be delivered through shrunken enterprises or other organisations altogether.

Now, I can’t comment on the management bloat or otherwise at the top of the Audit Commission, but the research teams we worked with in this particular quango slated for closure were efficient, knew what they wanted, handled procurement carefully and economically, and applied a great deal of knowledge and insight to the findings. Based on my own experience, I find it hard to believe that taxpayers are being well served by losing all this expertise to the ether.

Then there are organisations previously funded by government now being forced to seek alternative sources of income. Many have information, expertise and services which have commercial potential, but the change of culture can be an uncomfortable ride.

As a bog-standard commercial company with salaries to pay and shareholders to please, we’ve occasionally encountered suspicion from those who’ve been working to a charitable, academic or government agenda, as if any company with a profit motive must be unethical by design.

I’ve never believed this, and I hope one benefit of government, commercial and third-sector bodies being thrown together in Big Society-style partnerships is that boundaries will be blurred and cultures will rub off on one another.

Whether it happens quickly enough to save the non-profits for whom profit has suddenly entered the vocabulary remains to be seen: my money’s on those staffed by people who understand the value of their own knowledge and how they can help others benefit from it.

Then there are the armies of local community organisations who never had much money in the first place. Somerset Community Food are a good example of a group which has pursued funding from appropriate sources and is enabling other participants to contribute information to their FoodMapper project quickly and easily. You don’t have to be grubby and commercial to realise that investing wisely in your information assets will deliver returns to your cause.

And of course that’s the common theme, the ultimate differentiator which will separate those organisations and individuals who will sink and those who will swim. There’s money in food, and there’s money in every other sphere of sustainability research. We just need to channel it to the organisations who are building vital insight, working to make sure it reaches the decision makers, and taking the best from government, commerce and third sector cultures to keep the important work going.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

Anything which will move us towards investment spending again after this prolonged period of post-election purdah must be welcomed, but even the least politically minded among us must wonder how it is all going to work.

The idea, as we know, is for the Fund to “re-balance” the economy of England (the devolved governments and London will be funded separately) by funding projects which will “encourage private sector enterprise” and “create additional sustainable private sector employment”, which have been proposed by local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) or directly by private sector organisations.

What I hope this consultation exercise picks up is that any organisation responsible for setting local economic strategy and bidding for considerable sums of cash needs good quality information on which to base its decisions and justifications.

By definition, Lord Heseltine and his colleagues who will be assessing the LEPs’ proposals will also need to know whether the priorities set by business-led groups adequately reflect the overall needs of the community.

This isn’t to imply that local public-private groupings can’t do a better job than large and possibly less accountable regional development authorities: the freedom to operate within self-defined “economic geographies” and to prioritise what matters to them has clear potential to improve things.

But prioritisation, whoever does it, requires expertise and sound, reliable data. As we know from our work, the investment that’s urgently required in the east of a city may be entirely different to what’s needed in the west. Rural communities will need something else again. And new jobs need to be the right kind of jobs. We need to know before we decide.

The Fund is initially committed for only two years, though it may continue, which is more likely to encourage quick-win job creation schemes than building long-term resilience into our economy to meet challenges such as climate change.

I have great respect for anyone willing to work on a voluntary basis, presumably in addition to a demanding private sector job, to help manage a LEP. Time will tell whether the attractions of local participation tempt the brightest and best to do it: I hope so, since we will inevitably lose local knowledge and expertise with the disbanding of the RDAs and other quangoes.

For my money (and it is my money, as well as yours) I’d like to see some of the savings made in abolishing RDAs invested in the economic, social and environmental information made available to the public-spirited individuals who are expected to replace them. If we want accountable and transparent local development decisions from our LEPs, it’s a small price to pay.

Have your say on the Regional Growth Fund Consultation on the BIS website [external link] before 6 September 2010.

Ruth Keily

An exciting new project is underway for Geofutures: working with the Centre for Sustainable Energy, we’re modelling and mapping residential heat demand for Regen SW, the renewable energy agency for the south-west of England.

The aim is region-wide insight into the potential for renewable and low-carbon heat generation and distribution, with outputs at sufficiently fine scales to allow users to identify individual buildings and groups of buildings which could benefit from heat distribution installations.

It’s set to be the most advanced heat mapping exercise undertaken in the UK to date, building on CSE’s proven expertise in modelling heat demand in London, Bristol and West Sussex, with the addition of Geofutures’ experience in using GIS to analyse fine-resolution data, as well as simply visualising results.

An important benefit of starting with data at building level is the ability to aggregate results upwards without losing accuracy, still maintaining the ability to drill down to fine scales at chosen locations. Other studies have started with data generalised for hundreds of addresses, which can only output heat demand results for broad areas. For local heat distribution to become a reality, we need data for highly localised decision making.

See the website of the Centre for Sustainable Energy.

Colin’s thesis is that the food security issue is a simple matter of feeding the population as far as practical from local sources, recognising that some trade between specialist production areas will always be necessary. He argues that we simply need macronutrients (energy foods and protein), mainly in the shape of grains, and micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – and that by growing lots of wheat and encouraging more urban horticulture we can feed ourselves. I’m brutally over-summarising, of course, but he is keen to keep things simple.

This desire for simplicity makes him question the value of analyses like the land use mapping Geofutures did for this piece of research: “Elaborate models analyzing overall ecological footprints of particular communities in fine detail are not necessary. So long as we do the best we can within the guidelines we can’t really go wrong,” he writes.

However, at the end of his commentary he includes a postscript in a different mood. “This and all the other questions raised in this essay could and should have been addressed decades ago, and would have been addressed by any government that was truly alert to world trends. There are many other questions, too – scientific, economic, sociological, moral, practical. Since the government is unlikely to act this side of food riots (which it will treat at “terrorism” and call out the riot police) people who give a damn need to ask the questions for ourselves.”

I believe in these sentences Colin contradicts his own conclusion that research – even elaborate models – are unnecessary. The Transition movement has been successful because it responds positively to this fear. People who have never been engaged in environmental questions are getting involved and feeling empowered to help plan their communities’ futures.

And government (here I include many local authorities, which have embraced Transition planning in local strategic plans) is witnessing this community feeling and slowly starting to respond. To encourage this and make energy-descent planning truly meaningful, major resources and policy shifts are needed. My experience of this kind of government is that is moves slowly and demands evidence before committing taxpayer’s money. The farming community needs evidence before it will change any current practices too.

Food security is not a stand-alone issue, of course. The land use analysis and mapping undertaken for this study was not as detailed as we would like – it needs local data from across the country to move to next level – but even so it revealed absolutely fundamental issues which will impact food relocalisation and our life experience after Peak Oil.

There is not enough woodfuel for space heating. If we need to relocalise food production, people will need to live in rural areas, including building houses on protected rural land. And major conurbations overwhelm the foodsheds of surrounding communities. Even if we could be steadfastly common-sense in our approach to planning future food supply, I’d say joined-up planning encompassing these kinds of issue is going to need a wee bit more research to get it right.

Colin describes his own analysis of food security as ‘radical’, and his faith that common sense will prevail without major shifts in political and economic priority is certainly that. In using phrases starting “What all cities can do is…” he is not acknowledging the gap between technical possibility (yes, we can all plant tomatoes on our balconies) and reality (but we won’t while we can still get them dirt cheap at Lidl, and by the time we realise we’re really in an energy crisis it will be too late).

The Transition movement is precisely about how we move from here to a more attractive version of the future, and for me that’s where there’s plenty more meaningful research still to be done.

Mark Thurstain-Goodwin

Read Colin’s full commentary here.

These maps are the results of our food security analysis published together with the Transition Network this month – you’ll find details of our methodology and a link to the full report in our earlier post.

The analysis is based on Defra land classifications, a permaculture model and a ‘food zoning’ model based on perishability and labour intensity, which places fruit and vegetable growing areas closest to the town, followed outwards by cereals and other food crops, dairy and beef, and finally sheep farming on the poorest soils furthest from the town.

Have a play and see how you can zoom in to see the component parts of the foodshed. Doing so against an aerial photography background brings home how a relocalised food economy might look around this classic market town.

Of course, the analysis raises many more questions: about the overlap between towns’ foodsheds, the lack of sufficient woodfuel and the urgent need for more fine-scale land use data among other issues. As Transition founder Rob Hopkins wrote in his blog, food scarcity is how wars start – unless, we hope, we’ve done much more analysis of this kind to plan for it effectively in advance.

It’s a good example of how GIS, spatial analysis and mapping data can bring possible future scenarios to life, igniting debate and making results widely accessible to experts and non-experts alike. For us, it’s satisfying applied to any sector, organisation or data type, but food security analysis probably has the widest implications of anything we do.

What happens when oil is too expensive to transport food around the world?

To avoid famine and food conflicts‚ we need to plan to re-localise our food economy. This map is part of that process – showing the food requirement ’footprints’ around settlements in SW England.

Use the pan and zoom controls to view your chosen area‚ and read more about how Geofutures is mapping our food future below.