Every year, miners harvest some 50 billion tons of sand from pits, beaches, riverbeds and ocean floors. For context, that’s just a smidgen more than 8,695 Great Pyramids. That’s every year. Ironically, however, the sands laying abundantly around the pyramids are worthless for construction, which is why all that sand is culled elsewhere – notably from riverbeds.

This is all so we can make the most ubiquitous mixed material in the world: concrete. A staggering 10 Billion tons of the stuff – 17,390 Great Pyramids’ worth, plus-or-minus a sphinx – is made each year from this sand and other aggregate materials. In essence, our roads and cities rise as our sand levels fall.

Problem is, it’s not just the depth of the riverbed after dredging and mining. There is ample evidence that water tables are negatively affected, riverbanks are prone to caving, and that water-dwellers and other local wildlife are impacted.

Well, you may say, so a little bit of the bank caves in, what’s the big deal? It’s that rapid gouging of the banks and bed cause changes in water flow and render the banks unstable. In 2017 a heavily populated section of the Vam Nao river in the Mekong delta collapsed. “The direct cause of the landslide was a huge underwater whirlpool that formed 180 meters away from land. The whirlpool was 380 meters long and 42 meters below the surface, and was likely a product of excessive sand theft.”[1] Sixteen homes plunged directly into the river after cracks formed well inland of the bank.

In July and August of last year, sections of National Highway 91 in An Giang province, Vietnam, collapsed due, residents said, to ubiquitous sand dredging operations in the area along with the damming issue noted above.  

Every concrete building, bridge, retaining wall, highway, lane divider, skyscraper, sidewalk and skateboard park is made largely from sand, so it’s no surprise that we need so much.

But where does it come from? Can’t we just wheel a line of trucks to a loading dock in the Sahara? If so, we’d just be slowly emptying the world’s largest sandbox with little harm done.

Nope. Very specific grain characteristics are needed for various applications. Concrete, for example, cannot contain shell fragments, while other mixtures prefer them. The shape of the grains – based on their source materials and the type of erosion that ground them – also determines how they bind together and whether they are appropriate for a given material. When it comes to concrete, notes National Geographic, “river sand is best: grains of desert sand are often too rounded to serve as industrial binding agents, and marine sand is corrosive.”

All sand mining has consequences at scale – especially at such a gigantic scale – but it seems that riparian mining operations are causing some of the most serious damage.

There have been a number of reports this year about issues with sand mining in the Mekong delta, based on a University of Southampton study that included sonar soundings of the riverbed, as well as comprehensive assessments of the damage this practice has on the local environment.

However, this goes far beyond the Mekong, especially to India – where a building boom has spurred the need for ever-more concrete – and China. China, The Independent notes, “since 2003…has poured more concrete every three years than the United States did in the entire 20th century.” Rivers and deltas around the world are in trouble due to both legal and illegal dredging of sand and gravel.

Considering it took many thousands of years to put it all there, it’s rather hard to replace. Though it comes from eroded rocks and shells, and will replenish over time, it is not considered a renewable resource. Researchers on the Mekong, for example, say sand there is being removed around twice as fast as it is being replenished. (Exacerbating this problem is a number of new dams which block up-to half the sediment that used to flow freely into the delta.)

While gold, coal, and iron are generally culled from empty lands, the best sands are found on the world’s original superhighways: our river systems, where a vast number of us live and work, and whose health we depend on.

“That is a problem,” noted Reuters in 2018, “not only because the deltas are home to millions of people but because they produce a significant share of the region’s food. Deltas dependent on the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Mekong and Yangtze rivers are now sinking and shrinking… a situation worsened by climate-related warming and rising seas.”

So, what to do? How do we build our sandcastles without using sand? Are there any solutions immediately available to replace the need for sand and other aggregates?

For the moment the answer will lie in standards and laws – and their actual enforcement – and on regulations of the sand mining industry. Currently, it is a largely unregulated business, wide open to corruption – at least one Indian minister has lost his job over it – and, as long as the world needs concrete, that is unlikely to change.

For the future, alternatives to concrete are under development or actually in use, some of which may be far superior as a material, as well as sequestering carbon rather than the reverse. See our articles “Can We Decarbonate the Concrete Jungle?” and Concrete Steps Reduce Concrete CO2″ for an exploration of these alternatives. 

References
[1] Saigoneer, April 24, 2017

Summary

Fact: Climate is heating up, both as a planetary condition and as a business reality

Fact: Even the companies seriously engaged in climate action – and it’s a growing list – are moving far too slowly toward goals that are far too safe 

Fact: We’re all victims – and perpetrators – of what Alex Steffen calls ‘predatory delay,’ the modern version of fiddling while Rome burns

Fact: Some business leaders are stepping forward and leading. But more – many more – are needed

Solution: Focus on the leverage points that will allow us all to move dramatically faster. Below, we’ll invite you to participate in our Catalytic Accelerator Program – 4 Years of Progress in 4 Weeks. 

The Tipping Point
Our ice sheets are melting, sea levels rising. Weather is less predictable and more severe. These are visible indicators of a looming climate tipping point, as we push Earth’s thermostat up by +1.5° to +2°C or more. 

The Other Tipping Point
Yet, as we’ve written before, humanity is dealing not with one such tipping point, but two, and they are competing to determine our future. 

The first is visible and physical – melting glaciers, flooded cities, and sunken islands. The second is a social tipping point – subtler, less dramatic and less observable, but just as real: a melting of resistance to engaging in sustainability, and a rising tide of climate action. 

Up to now, however, while there is social action, the climate tipping point has been in ascendance.

For example, we recently reported on the change in the number of companies signing on to Science Based Targets (SBTs) and reporting to CDP.

These charts show excellent growth. That 789 companies have now submitted a science-based target is especially gratifying considering the program only began in 2016.

Yet this number still means the other 1,211 companies on  Forbes’ 2000 Largest Companies list have not. Not yet.

The 7,000 or so businesses reporting annually to CDP is wonderful, but it’s just a tiny fraction of the nearly 230,000 U.S. businesses with 100+ employees. This does not include corporate China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, and South America. A staggering number are not reporting, perhaps not even tracking their emissions. Not yet.

However, there is movement here now. A Boston College State of Corporate Citizenship survey of 750 global firms found that “nearly 75% of respondents report their companies have quantitative goals to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) in place or are in the process of establishing these targets.”[1]

Still, with something as huge and complex as the climate, it will require either enormous weight or incredible momentum to cause a substantial, meaningful shift.

Audacious Gorillas
And, as if right on schedule, along comes an enormous weight – Microsoft, with its $1.23 trillion market cap – creating incredible momentum with a bold pronouncement at Davos that the company will eliminate all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2030. 

So, what’s up with Microsoft? After all, though a few other giant corporations made major announcements at Davos (see a partial list in Observations, here), the vast majority did not.

This proclamation is, as Microsoft themselves put it, “audacious.” Yet it is more than that: it is catalytic. 

Catalytic Leadership
With 2030 now less than a decade away, Microsoft has decided to sprint while others continue to jog, walk, even crawl. The overwhelming majority of global corporations have, up to now, been crawling at best. But Microsoft’s initiative may catalytically impact these other companies, not just their own operations. 

Microsoft has now committed to charging for carbon throughout their supply chain. That is catalytic. They’re funding carbon capture innovations and startups. That is catalytic. Their announcement was public, at the largest, most prestigious and climate-forward meeting of business leaders in the world. That is catalytic. And they have pledged a billion dollars over the next four years[2] to support needed innovation. That, too, is catalytic.

We’ll all have to see how this plays out, but this could be a splendid example of how a massive snowball gets rolling, once a catalyst acts upon it. Will the joggers start to run? The walkers jog? The watchers get into the starting blocks? Which global player will be next to announce? Already, Amazon employees are upping the pressure on their leadership, asking “if Microsoft can, why can’t we?”[3] 

Consider that, just weeks after Goldman Sachs earmarked three-quarters of a trillion dollars for sustainability programs, BlackRock announced it was placing climate at the core of its entire $7 trillion investment / divestment strategy. Now, as Bloomberg reports, investment firm Brunel Pension Partnership announced it will also be aligning its $39 billion weight behind climate change. Are these the shifting snows that precede an avalanche?  

The Bass Diffusion model, as we discussed back in December, suggests that Innovators get copied by Imitators as an innovation spreads. The ease or difficulty of the change for Imitators, and how compelling they find it, greatly affects how far and fast it spreads. Then, once they move, they pull others along, leaving fewer and fewer on the sidelines. 

Let’s be frank: the business world is still at the beginning of this cycle. A few leaders have decided to run hard on climate, to sprint, to pour it on. These are the innovators, those who make and model change and impact others to change as well.

An increasing number are at least jogging on the track, seeing this work as something good citizens must do. 

There remains the legion of laggards who may have bought new sneakers, but are still busy lacing them up. The bulk of global companies, meanwhile, are content to watch the race from the stands.
 
The actions taken by Microsoft and others at Davos just might be the catalyst that starts the avalanche, the force slamming the teeter-totter hard enough to toss Big Carbon clear out of the playground.

Game Changers
Yet despite these courageous initiatives, global carbon emissions are still increasing, and most of the planet’s businesses are still sitting on the sidelines. The world needs to look very different in less than 10 years, which will require enormous, dramatic, politically gut-wrenching change. 

Catalytic leaders are needed, change agents, game changers in all sectors, innovating away, taking audacious steps, influencing far beyond their own manor. Such leadership will generate more adopters, which in turn will generate yet more. That is what’s needed.

How Valutus Can Help:

4 Years of Progress in 4 Weeks – The Catalytic Accelerator Program

Yet even for eager new adopters, these processes take time. Time to adapt, to learn what’s possible. Time to train and put systems in place. Time to ramp up and scale. Or so it seems.

Yet the planet is on red alert, in a level-5 emergency, at Defcon 1 – or should be – and there is no time. Acceleration of sustainability is necessary, and right now. 

Therefore we, too, are taking an audacious step. We’ve partnered with some of the foremost names in sustainability and business strategy to create a Catalytic Sustainability Accelerator designed to deliver Four Years of Progress in Four Weeks.

What makes sustainability performance take off is a combination of the right Resources, Relationships, and Routines. Our curated tools and methods will turbocharge your company’s ability to amplify both internal and external impacts.

Resources:
How do you create more investment, more commitment, more action?

• By tying your sustainability strategies and business models to the current megatrends, to the most important assets – such as talent – and the largest pools of untapped value. We’ll bring the tools, the analyses, and the methods you need to get this done quickly and profitably

• By speaking to internal audiences in terms they’ll understand, whether about ROI, legacy, or values. Some of the best communicators in the business will refine your message, develop a plan for amplifying it, and make your communications far more persuasive

Routines:
How do you embed sustainable actions in decisions, processes, and strategy? 

• We’ll build your capacity and identify how you can integrate sustainability into the way you do business, from C-suite to shop floor

Relationships:
How do you build relationships and collaborate with those whose efforts can be partnered with or leveraged?

• We’ll connect you to potential  partners who will streamline your path and amplify your reach

Our commitment:
To accelerate the progress of sustainability for innovative companies who will be models for – and catalysts for – change in others. 

Who can participate:
We’re opening this program to four carefully selected pilot partners. You’ll need to invest some money and, more importantly, commit dedicated staff time for the first four days, and the four weeks following, to accomplish more and create real momentum.

Our guarantee:
Working with us will dramatically accelerate your progress. We’re so confident of this that we’ll share the risk and reward. Put half your investment in us aside and release it only if you’re satisfied with the results. 

Have you ever asked yourself if there was a better way to accelerate your progress and catalyze your impact? 
The answer is yes. This is it.

The Catalytic Accelerator delivers the dramatic acceleration you need. Contact us today to explore whether this program is right for you at info@valutus.com or call +1.212.658.0405

References:
[1] 750 executive respondents from global firms in the U.S., Canada and Europe
[2]Bloomberg, Jan 17
[3]Seattle Times, Jan 29

Last year we reported on moss being used to clean, purify, and sanitize swimming pools and industrial cooling towers, thus dramatically reducing or replacing thousands of pounds of industrial chemicals which would otherwise have entered the waste stream.

It turns out that this miraculous stuff does the same thing for our air.

There are approximately 12 thousand species of moss and many of them, to one degree or another, harvest CO₂, fix nitrogen, pull many other toxins, particulates and heavy metals from the air and, crucially, give off oxygen just as their arboreal relatives do.

If this were just a scientific exercise, well and good. But air pollution is one of the worst health disasters ever to hit the human race – with between 7 million – 8.8 million dead and many millions more sickened annually. A simple, abundant, and low-maintenance living agent that can remove carbon and manufacture clean air in place of trees – where and when the problem hits hardest – is exactly what we need to combat our own fouling of the air.

In case you’re skeptical that a little moss could impact our atmosphere to any significant extent, there is a body of scientific evidence indicating that ground and marine mosses were the proximate cause of an early ice age – and the mass extinction that went with it.

Around 35 million years after true plants – such as mosses and worts – first appeared, an ice age and its concomitant mass extinction occurred. The mosses apparently did this – according to University of Exeter scientists – by bringing atmospheric CO₂ levels down from “22 times modern levels to just eight times modern levels. That was enough to trigger an ice age in the model of Ordovician Earth,” according to this theory. This, we’re told, is how our polar ice caps formed.

Okay then. Lower carbon levels, nitrogen fixing, adding oxygen, cooling and moisturizing, taking up very little space due to their cell-thin-leaves’ massive surface areas, and a vacuum for airborne pollutants and particulates. Where, oh where, can we get some of this stuff?

Well, there is a device popping up in perhaps twenty cities around Europe – known as the City Tree – that its maker claims can take up the same amount of carbon as 275 trees, or 5.5 acres of forest. A forest of that size also provides almost 650 kg of oxygen, and we would expect such a device to do the same.

Five-and-a-half acres of forest may not sound like much but it can suck up nearly 23 metric tons of CO₂ annually.[1]

Now, it may be desirable to plant five acres of forest on a street-corner in Delhi or Bangkok, but it is certainly not practical. With the exception of shade, a City Tree tower can have the same impact in an area the size of back-to-back park benches. In fact, they’ve installed benches on several models of these towers: even without shade, it’s cooler near respirating mosses, as noted in the ice-age model above.

These towers are self-contained – having a solar panel above and a well for rainwater to feed the moss – so they require little maintenance. They also contain advanced sensors and instrumentation for data on local temperature conditions, air quality and how well the unit is working. 

Why is all this important? Well, consider that New York City holds about “29,000 acres of parkland and urban forest” in all – including parks, sidewalk trees and wetlands. Using the metric above, that’s nearly 122,000 metric tonnes of carbon removed each year!

At that rate, about 5,200 of these devices would be needed to equal the carbon reduction of New York City’s woodlands, not to mention adding 3,375 metric tonnes of oxygen.

New York, of course, has been living under the EPA and Clean Air Act for decades, and has excellent air quality when compared, say, to Gurugram, Faisalabad or Hotan – numbers 1,3, and 8 respectively on the World Economic Forum’s list of the most-polluted cities in the world.

But clearly that’s not enough. And many cities do not enjoy the tree and plant cover that New York does.

So what’s the problem? Currently, it is cost. The units go for around $25,000 apiece, a price tag of $130 million to buy 5,200 of them.

That is a tidy sum. Yet in 2018 New York State announced improvements to the Nassau Expressway costing…you guessed it, $130 million to repair a roadway.

Even in countries such as India, which houses the majority of the world’s most-air-polluted cities, such projects can be done. A $400-million sustainable development project is currently underway in Tamil Nadu state.

Ho Chi Minh city is building a subway for an estimated $2.1 billion. In cities like Cairo, Delhi, Hanoi, and hundreds of others, such a device could potentially reduce carbon and increase oxygen dramatically without the need to plant and maintain millions of trees. The cost would not be low but the cost of unhealthy air isn’t low either. And, of course, we’d expect the cost of City Trees to fall as production volume increased.

Investments in large-scale carbon-capture technology are expected “to reach more than US$ 5.6 Bn by the end of 2026,” according to Fortune Business Insights, and City Tree is a simple, natural, modular and attractive carbon capture device, requiring no chemicals, little maintenance or machinery, just..well, humble prehistoric moss.

This is the type of solution we like. That is, in part, because it directly addresses one of the most challenging problems of our time. But also because it does so simply, and can be placed just where the problem is at its worst for immediate support of the populace and planet.

We need more trees, no doubt about it. But until we plant them, and until they grow, and until we’re sure we have enough ground water left to support them – hello, Chennai – then something immediate, self-contained, and small enough to fit in the space currently used by a couple of mailboxes, such as City Tree, is an elegant solution.

References:
[1] A healthy forest acre holds, conservatively, about 50 trees, and that acre can take up about 4.2 metric tonnes of CO₂ every year, equal to about 26,000 miles in an average gasoline-driven automobile

It’s an odd sensation to write about an array of huge climate initiatives and, in the same sentence, to note that they were announced at or about the World Economic Forum (WEF) – the largest gathering of wealthy corporate leaders in the world.

 We got a taste of this last year as a bunch of super-corporations collaborated on the launch of circular startup Loop, while Greta Thunberg pointed to the audience of world leaders and CEOs, and suggested they pull the fire alarm. “Your house is on fire!” she told them and, based on this year’s Davos revelations, some at least, were listening.

Prior to the 2020 WEF meeting, a letter from the founder and chairman to its members read, in part, “We look forward to the Annual Meeting 2020 being a breakthrough moment for business action on climate change.” Judging by the various announcements made by attendees, many seem to have taken that quite seriously.

The letter continued, “Thank you in advance for your consideration and leadership in helping the world address this urgent global issue.”

Well, thanking corporations in advance for their climate contributions has not, in our experience, met with much success. But this year, there were significant promises made and initiatives announced. Here are some of those that struck us most forcibly.

The WEF organizers themselves have been working to make their operations greener, this year employing AI and special chefs to whip up ‘sustainable’ meals for participants. They have gone so far, several reports noted, as to take meat and fish off the menu entirely.

At least on Wednesday. Well, at least at lunch.

Still, it’s a start and the WEF has a sophisticated ratings system for every single kilo of every ingredient with which they are striving to decarbonize their offerings and ensure there is (almost) no wasted food. “For me,” one vegan chef recruited for the event told Thomson Reuters, “success this week would be people tasting the food and saying, ‘holy crap, that was good, I can’t believe it was vegan.’ ”

WEF Risks May Fuel Sustainability Rewards…
This year, the five top risks reported in the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report (WEFGRR) were all related to the environment, an unprecedented finding. This is consonant with our own proprietary research – a survey of 30 large and diverse organizations, 90% of which are not focused on sustainability. As we reported, six of that group’s top-ten Global Megatrends were related to sustainability, with Climate Change ranked #1 – an eerily similar outcome to the WEFGRR.

The Soros Effect…
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros pledged $1Billion US to create a university matrix he is calling the Open Society University Network (OSUN).

Now, when we hear the word ‘billion’ next to sustainability and climate change projects, we get interested. It smacks of true, serious commitment and this year at Davos, the B-word was much in evidence.

The OSUN design is to fund education to combat both nationalism and climate change. Soros called the project, “the most important and enduring project of my life,” according the Associated Press.

Not to be Outdone…
Nestlé announced an investment of more than $2 billion for finding alternatives to virgin plastics in both products and packaging. Nestlé had previously committed to making all their packaging from reusable or recyclable materials by 2025, and this infusion of cash is designed to further this initiative, and also to remediate plastics already in the environment.

Carbon Neutral by… Now?
‘Big Four’ accounting firm Ernst & Young proclaimed that they would be carbon neutral before the year – this year – is out. They will be using a mélange of carbon offsets, renewables contracts, supply chain reductions and carbon removal in order to accomplish it.

And Speaking of Carbon Removal…
Microsoft made the surprising commitment not only to achieve carbon-negative operations by 2030, but to remove all the carbon they have ever been responsible for in their history by 2050. For more on the potential catalytic consequences of this bold announcement, see Intelligence, below.

Largeholders Funding Smallholders…
A coalition of large corporations, including a number of WEF partners and strategic partners, such as Rabobank and Unilever, have created a fund designed to support smallholder farms in developing nations. The fund – the world’s largest for the purpose, known as IDH Farmfit – begins at more than $110 million and “is expected to catalyze,” perhaps as much as $1.1 billion in commercial moneys to be invested in support of said smallholders. Ahhh! Catalyze is our favorite word.

Et Al…
There have been other announcements in more-or-less the same time frame that, while not directly associated with the Davos meetings, nonetheless point to a powerful convergence of entities with incredible power and influence leaning toward – some even sprinting toward – sustainable goals we’ve all been dreaming of for decades.

Goldman Sachs and BlackRock have announced that they are placing climate change squarely in the center of their governance and investment strategies. As GS wrote in their ESG Report, “We are committed to catalyzing innovative financial solutions and market opportunities to help address climate change.” They also committed to not taking any more companies public if all their board members are white men.

BlackRock had a similar message which was, more or less, ‘if you haven’t addressed climate change effectively, then we – and our $7 trillion in assets under management – are out.’

The New Yorker described the shift as “seismic,” and went on to note that, “the European Investment Bank—the largest international public bank in the world – announced that it would stop lending to fossil-fuel projects altogether.”

These financial firms are joining the other lifeblood of industry and commerce: insurers, and as we’ve written elsewhere, the giants of the reinsurance industry – such as Munich Re and Swiss Re – are pulling out of insuring some carbon-dependent sectors. Companies that can neither finance nor insure their businesses may be in seriously troubled waters.

It remains to be seen just what impact all these declarations will have going forward, and thanks in advance only goes so far. What is clear is that, at last, some of the true heavyweights of the global economy are starting to move, to shift, to lean some of their incredible, ponderous mass, in the direction of the climate. 

Some years ago scientists discovered ‘dark matter’ followed shortly by their identification of ‘dark energy.’ It is ‘known’ that about 27% of the universe consists of the former while 68% is made of the latter. Everything else – all that can be seen and touched – makes up the 5% that remains.

But these scientists are at it again, and they’ve now come up with the most improbable ‘dark’ of the lot: Dark Solar. Dark What!?

Apparently, we really can feel the power of the dark side. This is solar energy that can be harvested at night – long the dream of renewable-energy champions. Consider the 13% of humanity with no access to grid electricity at all. Some of those communities have, as we’ve reported, begun installing solar grids for power, but can only take advantage of them in daylight. If this pans out – and the journal Joule called it “immediately practical for lighting and off-grid sensors” – that may change. If it does, the argument that solar only works in daylight becomes moot.

The principle involved – radiative cooling – is well-known but has not, until now, been harnessed for power.

Despite the sun’s best efforts, the Earth stays at a fairly constant temperature. “When the flow of incoming solar energy is balanced by an equal flow of heat to space, Earth is in radiative equilibrium, and global temperature is relatively stable,” says NASA, which balance is known as Earth’s ‘energy budget.’ Think of it almost as respiration, the breathing of heat in, the exhaling of it out again.

But there’s an incredible amount of heat coming in, some 430 quintillion Joules an hour, more than the whole planet uses in a year. Which means that same incredible amount of energy must rise and boil off into space at night for the system to remain stable. Surely we can use some of it?

The technology available to harvest this bonanza is still quite crude. It’s made of simple household materials and resembles, opines the New York Times, “a hockey puck set inside a chafing dish. The puck is a polystyrene disk coated in black paint and covered with a wind shield. At its heart is an off-the shelf gadget called a thermoelectric generator, which uses the difference in temperature between opposite sides of the device to generate a current. A similar device powers NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars.” 

So far, this device can only harvest a fraction of the power of photovoltaic cells and, so far, only small LEDs have actually been lit in this way. However, as Intelligent Living notes, “Once they are able to refine the system to produce anywhere close to as much energy as a standard solar panel, it could completely transform the renewable energy sector. It’s cheaper to make and can provide a way to generate electricity at a time that solar panels can’t.”

In 2018 the world used ≈ 585 TWh of solar energy.[1] Let’s say the best that can be done is a DS panel with half the efficiency of current solar tech, that’s still an additional 292 TWh. Even with such relatively low output that’s about as many TWh as 35.5 U.S. nuclear reactors.[2]

It’s unclear exactly when we’ll all feel the power of the Dark Side, but if this really is feasible, it’s an enormous step forward for renewables.

Watch this space.

References:
[1] Our World in Data, Global renewable energy consumption, World[2] Based on 2016 figures. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States

These things are absolutely going to matter in the runup to 2030 and beyond. A strategy aligned with these megatrends can make your voyage a success. Failure to heed them just might put you on the rocks.

At the same time, figuring out which trends are rising and which falling within a dynamic landscape can be difficult. “In this environment, forecasting has become almost impossible – change is no longer linear but exponential,” notes Roland Berger.*

Perhaps, but at least we can keep a weather eye on the crucial trends that may affect us, and our organizations. We can see what is happening, assess the risks, and watch closely what others are paying attention to — and planning for.

Now that 2020 is here, and the engines driving climate change — including the risks and opportunities associated with them — are clearly understood, the notion above is even more critical than before.

Now, I have believed for years that companies who failed to consider climate change as a critical trend — and a major-league risk — were not planning effectively. But that’s me, and I’ve been working in sustainability for 25+ years.

What about organizations that aren’t in the field? They may have other ideas, based on their own unique mission and experience. How much weight do they actually give to sustainability and climate change? Which megatrends are they following?

I decided to find out, and set our research team to look at what thirty large and influential organizations — think tanks, corporations, government agencies, consultancies, and more; across sectors and around the world — were thinking.

In this proprietary 30 for ’30 Megatrends survey, we searched for and compiled what these sources see as the biggest and most critical trends for the next decade.

We intentionally leaned towards organizations that were not sustainability-focused — 90% of the entities we included were not related to sustainability.

Yet climate change took the top spot as the predominant megatrend. That in itself is fascinating considering the broad scope of these sources: military and civilian, strategists and accountants, forecasters and governments, and more.

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, for example, has said climate change, “These changes… will have direct and indirect social, economic, political, and security effects,” including impacts on agriculture, migration, infrastructure, supply chains, and beyond.

Financial services firm PwC, the Rand Corporation, the U.K. Ministry of defense, and others just as diverse, also had the changing climate high on their lists.

As different as these organizations’ perspectives were, however, as a group they saw issues related to sustainability as shaping the world over the next decade. Here are a few examples:

#1 Climate change, which underpins many of the other trends on the list

#3 Urbanization, which is forecast to increasingly become a function of climate change. Coastal areas face challenges, desertification and groundwater issues move people off the land, and many other submerged effects of changing conditions swell our cities

#6 Resource scarcity, too, is clearly a partial function of higher global temperatures. Water. Food. Power. Trees and forests. Species. The climate is going to dramatically alter these in the coming decade. Worldwater’s ‘Water Scarcity Clock’, for example, keeps a running total of humans living in water-scarce areas, currently above 2.36 billion. They expect that will rise to 2.7+ billion by 2030.

And let’s not forget #10, mass migration which, while historically a function of war, persecution, or economic conditions will increasingly come from climate-driven sources such as those noted above. In fact, the 2018 World Bank report, Groundswell: Preparing for Climate Change found that, without drastic and concerted action, around 143 million people will be displaced within their own country’s borders by mid-century, “to escape the slow-onset impacts of climate change.”

Thus, four of the top ten issues these 30 major organizations see as megatrends relate directly to sustainability. But the results held another surprise.

Our survey showed that climate change was top-of-mind for a wide variety of organizations most of whom had nothing directly to do with sustainability. That means any company’s strategy may founder if it doesn’t include the biggest force driving the world we’ll see in 2030. That’s a problem.

And not just for you: it means your entire company probably has a blind spot. Most people pondering the largest global megatrends imagine that sustainability is somewhere on the list. But now we know where it should actually be placed: right at the top.

If you or your organization hasn’t already positioned it there, you are navigating from the wrong chart and that, too, is a problem.

Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, also sees climate change as a core concern moving into the 2030s and — raise your hand if you see another trend forming — has been refusing to insure some Big Carbon producers.

As their chief climatologist — notice that they have one — told The Guardian last year, “if the risk from wildfires, flooding, storms or hail is increasing then the only sustainable option we have is to adjust our risk prices accordingly. In the long run it might become a social issue,” meaning people and businesses with lower incomes may not be able to afford insurance at all.

This could be a game-changer for the social fabric, and for companies and systems dependent on solvent families and businesses in order to thrive. Homes, small businesses, land in a flood or wildfire zone, or a business model based on carbon, may shortly be uninsurable.

On the other hand, companies probably want more than to simply compete. They want to do something good for the world, to work in alignment with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goas (SDGs), to be leaders in resolving the worlds ills.

Clear and penetrating understanding of megatrends can allow these organizations to be more, to do more, to have a catalytic effect. As we’ve noted many times, companies who lead on sustainability are the ones who drive innovation, and thrive by placing their values out front.

It is interesting that the World Economic Forum’s risk-trends assessment also lists Climate Change as their top issue, with an eerily similar list of corollary risk factors.

This point should not be lost on any of us: the very opportunities afforded by these trends when properly planned for, present a nearly identical set of risks when they are not. Whether you end up stuck on a reef or with a strong breeze at your back depends on how well these megatrends are embedded in your strategic plans.

To learn more about our 30 for 30 megatrend original research, and how best to apply it, contact us or email me directly.

* Roland Berger was one of the sources surveyed in our 30 for 30 research.