“It’s Mindsets We Have To Change”

Jonathan Porritt is one of the world’s leading environmental campaigners. Discover his latest thinking around sustainability and the climate challenge.

As one of the most knowledgeable voices in the environment sector, Jonathan Porritt has a strong track record when it comes to campaigning for sustainability. With over half a century of highlighting the consequences of climate change, he now works with multinational corporations such as Unilever and Sky to improve their environmental values and practices.

“2023 was without a doubt the worst year ever in terms of manifestations of the climate crisis,” Porritt said in a recent presentation for the Carbon Balanced Paper programme. “During 2023 and in the first two months of 2024, we’ve seen climate records being broken on an almost daily basis. It’s astonishing to try and keep track of what is actually going on out there.”

Lifelong Champion Of Paper

Having been involved in the print and paper industry since he planted 70 acres of trees in New Zealand five decades ago, Jonathan Porritt understands the benefits of sustainable forestry and its positive effects on
climate change.

“I’m an unapologetic lover of paper,” he said. “I like to write everything on paper. I don’t really like reading things on screen. For me, it’s a really important medium and has been a vital part of my life.”

However, while Porritt is very aware of the advantages of paper and the low environmental impact of the sector, he acknowledges that the wider public need clearer information about the production of paper.

‘We’re dealing with very low levels of basic awareness about some aspects of the paper industry,” he said. “Surveys of environmental groups reveal disturbingly low levels of knowledge about the industry’s processes and the whole value chain, and what we can do as individuals or organisations to help reduce that total footprint of the industry itself. It’s mindsets we have to change as much as the technology.’

Increasing Awareness

Porritt makes the connection between the public’s lack of awareness about the sustainability of the paper industry and the challenge of getting politicians and policy makers to take the climate emergency seriously.

“What’s happened is that we’ve been hearing about the climate emergency for so many years that we’ve become used to this drip-drip effect,” he explained. “Another report, another data point, another disaster, another fire, another drought, another flood. We hear that new information and it sits front-of-mind for a short period of time, then just as quickly, we stash it away in the back of our mind. Because to do anything else with it would be disruptive to our lives.

“I believe this is what’s happening to politicians. They have never really understood the significance of the climate phenomenon. They have always seen it as ‘an environmental issue’. But climate change is not simply an environmental issue; it’s about the future of our economy and the future of humankind.”

An Existential Crisis

While Porritt isn’t by nature a gloomy person – he has a typically British sense of optimism – his assessment of the climate crisis is very downbeat.

“The climate crisis is an existential crisis,” he stated. “Because if we can’t find ways of getting on top of this within the next 10 years, then we face this very scary risk of irreversible runaway climate change. That means that things will start to get worse, and as they get worse, we may reach a tipping point where one part of the complex interlocking system tips into another state. Once it’s tipped, you’re not going to tip it back again in timescales that are relevant to humankind’s existence on this planet.

“A key part of this crisis is what’s happening to biodiversity – the web of life on which we all depend. We are facing a situation where between one and two million species are at the risk of extinction. And during my lifetime as a sustainability campaigner, that number has just gone up and up.”

The Good News

However, Porritt does see a way out. He’s a great believer in the advances in technology and its ability to reverse the impact of climate change. “The technology shifts that have been going on in the last decade are incredible,” he said. “We’ve now got opportunities to decarbonise every sector as fast as we possibly can and much faster than seemed possible 10 or 20 years ago.”

He also has a message for print and paper companies that, while their environmental records are commendable, there’s still more that can be done to reduce their emissions.

“We know there’s been significant improvements in reducing the overall carbon footprint of the industry,” he says. “But while it mostly relies on renewable energy to provide the primary energy, it still depends on roughly 30% of gas. So I want to ask how soon can the paper industry get rid of every last burn of gas that’s being used in the industry today?”

For more information about Jonathan Porritt, go to www.jonathonporritt.com