The UK Government’s roadmaps for meeting its environmental targets provide a new and important piece of the complex global jigsaw of technologies, policies and business models needed to overcome climate change and usher in a new economic era.

In an area full of huge challenges, one consolation is that the elements of the solution are all available. Science provides the understanding of climate change needed to inform policy. Policies, ranging from emissions trading to support for renewable energy to vehicle and building regulations, are available to reward clean energy and penalise carbon emissions. And at the end of this chain, businesses stand ready with the green products and services that form the building blocks of the future – from wind turbines to bicycles, smart grids to ultra-efficient industrial motors.

What has been missing is the implementation. And that of course requires courage and co-ordination between the players in the chain – scientists, policy-makers, business leaders and investors.

Courage is easier to summon up if there is a clear end in sight. So what is desperately needed is a complete, compelling vision of a sustainable future – one that inspires people so much that they are motivated to map out the pathways that lead to it from where we are today - so-called ‘back-casting’.

Part of the problem is that our discussions are framed by the paradigm of industrialisation that has become the norm over the past 200 years – based on the massive and unsustainable exploitation of natural resources.

If global warming is to be addressed, we need a vision of a new era beyond the age of fossil fuels – an ‘age of sustainability’ or a ‘green world’ – driven by the need to enable nine billion people (the anticipated world population in 2050) to live on one planet in equity and justice. This requires new polices, new products, new services, new business models, new funding mechanisms. The vision of a green future needs to be specific and detailed - a green equivalent of the General Motors Futurama exhibition of 1939 which celebrated the age of oil with a vista of cars, freeways and urbanisation and driving.

The problem is that at the moment progress towards even visualising that future, let alone creating it, is being frustrated by a series of disconnects in the interplay of science, policy, investment and business response.

To start with, today’s policy, even at its most advanced, tends to be based on yesterday’s science. World leaders are only now discussing a sequel to the Kyoto Treaty that was drawn up in 1997, based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) early reports when the evidence for global warming was much more tentative that it is today.

Copenhagen will bring policy into line with the IPCC’s 2007 report, but the risk is that there will need to be another revision to take account of the more alarming findings of newer science, particularly around climate feedbacks that amplify the effect of global warming – such the declining reflectivity of sea-ice that accelerates its melting and the release of trapped methane as tundra warms.

We need to get to a position where policy is informed by the latest science and is therefore tough enough to provide a stable context for investment in the step change in innovation that is needed to provide the goods and services of the future at the scale required. It is difficult to make progress incrementally – science that is cautiously presented leading to small advances in policy that enable modest moves in energy efficiency and low-carbon energy. Incremental progress doesn’t easily deliver massive new investments such as power plants with carbon capture, distributed power systems or large scale concentrated solar thermal installations. 

After Copenhagen we need a further discussion between the scientific, political, academic, investment and business communities to reform the process by which the world confronts this challenge. We need a way to get all the available science onto the table, construct the necessary vision of the future and then plan the pathways towards it. Otherwise, if we keep shuffling uncertainly towards sustainability there is the risk of a ‘climate crunch’ in a few years time when more disturbing science coincides with increasing physical evidence of global warming, suddenly bringing home the fragility of humanity’s future and triggering a panic reaction with colossal disruption to economies and societies. 

Conversely, in thinking low-carbon now, we will understand what the world will look like post-carbon: and in so doing, we will start to recognise that the debate is not about what we won’t have and be able to do, but what will be possible. In so doing we will recognise why this will be so exciting, the ground will shift, and together we will seek to create this new future, to actively bring it into being. 

There will be costs involved in the transition, but as Lord Stern and others have powerfully argued, the costs of inaction will ultimately be greater, and the sooner we start in earnest, the lower the costs will be.  And while some changes will bring costs to consumers and businesses, others will be investments that deliver returns within relatively short timeframes. 

Subsidies for fossil fuels need to be abandoned, but should be balanced by support for clean energy. Pollution needs to have a price, for example through emissions trading. But investment in energy efficiency, whether loft insulation or industrial heat exchangers, will pay a dividend. Investment in high carbon industries from oil to cement, will become less attractive, but governments have the chance to stimulate new forms of sustainable investment, such as issuing debt in the form of ‘green bonds’ that are tied to environmental targets and projects.   Innovation will go hand in hand with changes in behaviour, for example as new forms of transport help travellers reduce their carbon emissions, entertainment becomes more digital and supply chains become more sustainable. 

Finally the vision of a green world isn’t only about the environment. It’s about truly sustainable development, using new forms of energy to promote health, education and livelihoods in the developing world. By an interesting coincidence, the date by which the IPCC says emissions need to peak in order to hold the temperature rise on pre-industrial times to around two degrees centigrade – widely held as the tolerable limit - is 2015. That’s also the deadline for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.  Is it too optimistic to hope that the momentum created by the election of Barack Obama, the increasing determination being shown by governments such as the UK’s and the make-or-break nature of Copenhagen might create the conditions for a global five year plan to make unprecedented and material progress in confronting the world’s two giant challenges of sustainability and development?   

It would be too cynical not to hope for it – especially when we hold the wherewithal to overcome these challenges in our hands. But what is needed first is a compelling vision of tomorrow’s green economy, and the drivers and dynamics of sustainable value creation, to harness the capabilities and commitment of all the key forces and institutions that we need to create the Age of Sustainability.

Tony Manwaring