Celebrating interdependence at nef’s The Bigger Picture

posted at 1:21pm, 04 Nov 09 by Whitney [ 1 comment ]

As the Impact and Sustainability Manager here at Cafédirect, I’m charged with thinking about how to assess the impact of our business. And when your business looks beyond profit and aims to bring about postive economic, social and environmental change to the world, measuring that change in hard numbers isn’t easy.

In fact, you soon discover that financial, social and environmental issues are all tied up together in one big, complex, interdependent (and lovely) mess.

This discovery is nothing new to the good folks over at nef (the new economics foundation). They’ve been telling us just how interconnected economics, people and the planet are for quite a while now. I recently attended an event they put on called The Bigger Picture: Festival of Interdependence.

Beyond creating a fantastic, buzzing atmosphere with a plethora of interesting things to see, hear and do, (and some lovely tea and coffee, I might add) I took two gems away from the day:

1) My very own personal carbon rationing book

Courtesy of nef’s MINISTRY OF TRYING TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT, this handy book challenges me to emit only my ‘equitable personal carbon ration’ in a month. I can choose my emissions from all sorts of activities … from taking a bath to using my laptop, but in the end I only get 40 carbon rations in total. Long story short, it’s a mental exercise that brings home a clear message … meeting that limit ain’t easy.

nef ration book

Our grandparents lived through war time food rationing, and we may well see the day of this type of carbon rationing. That’s thought provoking, but when I compare the per capita greenhouse gas emissions of a UK resident (10.6 Tonnes CO2e) to residents of some of the countries of our grower partners, say a Peruvian (2.8 Tonnes CO2e) or a Ugandan (1.1 Tonne CO2e)*, the inequity of the current way of living and emitting really hits home.

2) TINA and TATA in ‘The Great Transition’

My day at The Bigger Picture event ended with a stimulating discussion of how this world can, and indeed will, make the seemingly impossible transition to truly sustainable and equitable living for all. With Copenhagen fast approaching, it was a lively session.

If I had to pick one gem from the entire session, it is the TINA vs. TATA debate. Margaret Thatcher popularised the mantra “There Is No Alternative”, or TINA, generally meaning that modern societies can only develop along the pathways of existing models of markets, trade and globalisation. Here at Cafédirect we certainly don’t believe that. In fact we’re in the business of showing that there is a different way to trade that considers the livelihoods of those along the entire (interdependent) supply chain. We fall much more into the camp of TATA, meaning ‘There Are Thousands of Alternatives’.