Isramart : UK in need of "beyond carbon" economic strategy, says Aldersgate Group

Isramart news:
A report produced by lobbying coalition, the Aldersgate Group, has urged the government to extend its low carbon industrial strategy to include improving the efficiency with which resources other than carbon, such as water and materials, are produced and used.

In a foreword to the report, former Environment Agency chairman Sir John Harman argues that given "human societies are already depleting the physical and biological resources of the earth at un unsustainable rate" and that we know little "about the pace at which resource efficiency will have to be driven, nor about which resources will most immediately require management", it would be prudent "to promote low resource consumption as a vital part of securing future competitive advantage in advance of the market".

Although "today's political interest in carbon is wholly justified", says Harman, "the politics of carbon will be a theme replayed...in one resource area after another", and the government should begin to work out how it will manage our "entire economy" in resource efficient ways, and "not by serial attention to each problem resource as the problem becomes critical".

The report is based on discussions by three Aldersgate Group working groups that looked at water, food and materials. The groups concluded that resource efficiency is essential to a low carbon economy, but that pricing policy alone will prove insufficient to achieve necessary change.

A crucial challenge identified by the report is the job of convincing the UK Treasury to adopt resource efficiency policies as a key objective and for its staff to adopt measures such as physical accounting, or mass balance studies, for the use of key resources on an economy-wide basis. Despite the efforts of organisations such as Green Alliance, the Treasury has been deaf to such calls for more than a decade, notes the report.