Speaking at Sustainable Business – the Event the organisation’s head of business relations Dax Lovegrove gave his views on where we’re doing well and what will need to change if we’re to make genuine progress towards a low-carbon society.
“What we need to do is transform our high carbon sectors,” he said.
“The other thing we need to do is ensure that low carbon industries are really taking off and displacing high carbon business.”
He said that a WWF report found that low carbon, clean tech industries needed to be starting to grow by 20% per year by 2014 to be ‘on track’.
“That’s an ambitious but feasible growth rate for any new industry to start taking off,” he said.
“That pace means that clean tech industries will be able to flourish after 2014 competitively in a free market. If we don’t achieve that goal we’ll require massive government interventions.
“We’ve got a very short window to get the frameworks and policy right.”
Looking at the question of whether the UK is likely to meet this kind of transformation, he said that there were some key industries that appeared to be ‘re-carbonising’ such as oil, gas and aviation, while others such as car manufacture, the food sector and the power sector showed positive signs.
“We are seeing a real turning point,” he said.
“We’re not on track yet but the signs are encouraging.”
Sam Bond