The conference started really well with an amazing never-seen-before highlight, which even though it went largely unappreciated, certainly made my day: My work had been published! The Summit Statement contained my work on the economics of a Green Economy, the challenges it creates for different sectors and the opportunities for growth and employment creation. Wohoo!!! It may not sound like such a big deal – it probably isn’t – but it is incredibly satisfying and exciting to see that your work actually has a purpose! So that totally made my morning and I bounced through the Convention Centre high on author’s pride and coffee :)
At a previous conference I attended, the organisers had made every effort to ensure that “sustainable consumption”, “optimal use of resources” and “low waste economy” did not remain empty words: They had printed the program on already used paper, not used plastic bottles for water and offered organic and free-range food from local producers. The aim of the Green Economy Summit was to “Move South Africa to a Resource Efficient, Low Carbon and Pro-Employment Growth Path” – so let’s see if the organisers managed to translate these objectives into actions or whether they remained empty promises…
Pro-Employment
The Summit certainly succeeded in creating substantial employment: The amount of waiters, cleaners and catering staff was incredible and their motivation overwhelming! If you left your table during lunch, the waiters would assume that you had finished and clear a full plate, an untouched desert and an un-opened drink immediately. Strangely I am not sure just how well this goes together with the resource-efficient, low-waste goal of the Summit...
Anyway, so the Summit managed to generate employment in catering, but unfortunately missed another great opportunity to create jobs: When the President attended the Summit, security restrictions were incredibly strict, but unfortunately the organisers only hired security staff for one scanner. This meant that the Summit failed to generate more employment, but also became problematic when 200 women wanted to go “freshen up” in the bathroom, which was located outside the security zone. So five minutes later when everyone tried to rush back inside, one security scanner had to deal with 200 women and 200 handbags... needless to say the queues were going down the stairs and the whole schedule was messed up...
Low Carbon
There are two major sources of carbon in South Africa: Electricity and transport.
The majority of our electricity is generated from coal - dirrrty coal! - and using less electricity directly reduces carbon emissions. Realising this and knowing that lightning is the “low hanging fruit” of carbon savings, the Convention Centre decided to take radical action and dim all the lights in the bathrooms. Unfortunately they overdid it slightly and one almost had to leave the door open to see anything in the cubicle…
So while the Convention Centre successfully reduced its carbon footprint in the bathrooms, it didn’t quite manage to do it in the conference venues: The air-con was running on overload and turned most of the rooms into refrigerators. So while I give the organisers credit for trying to save carbon, thinking about it first would have been a good idea – then someone might have realised that it would be much better to save on air-con and leave the lights in the bathroom on!
Another big chunk of carbon emissions in South Africa comes from the transport sector and using public transport was recently described - quite accurately - as “unsafe, overcrowded, unreliable, expensive and run by operators who will at times (sometimes literally) kill their competition in order to keep their routes and licenses”. I met one person who had actually travelled to the conference using public transport (which cost him a stunning R1 one way – to put this in relation, parking for the day was R40!), but the majority of delegates came by car. This by itself would not be too bad if people shared journeys, but unfortunately I know that this was not the case: Looking only at Treasury, seven people attended the Summit and I know for a fact that at least six cars went from Pretoria to Joburg every morning… emitting carbon, wasting petrol, blocking up the roads – a clear sign that environmental awareness has not even reached those people trying to promote a low carbon growth path!
Resource Efficient
So the Summit may have failed somewhat on the low carbon front, but it went through a lot of effort to make sure that it was resource efficient in every possible way!
Trying to promote a more efficient use of water, the Convention Centre had reduced the water pressure in all sinks. While this certainly saved water, it definitely didn’t save time as it took about five minutes to wash your hands!
One of the cardinal sins of conferences seems to be to under-cater, which often means that conference venues end up with vast amounts of left-over’s. So what to do with the fish that didn’t get eaten at dinner or the croissants that no one wanted for breakfast? The answer is simple yet disgusting: Recycle! Fish from dinner can easily be turned into a curried, deep fried lunch for the next day; croissants can be become savoury snacks during tea breaks; and left over deserts can be re-portioned and offered again the next day. It really isn’t nice, appetising or tasty when you recognise that what you have on your plate for lunch is the food that you didn’t want for dinner the night before! Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!!!
Anyway, the Convention Centre tried to do its share to ensure an efficient use of resources and the organising committee and the speakers also wanted to contribute their fair share. The speakers were asked to stick to two pages per speeches (to save paper?), but unfortunately seemed to have missed this part and instead wrote twenty-page speeches. To make up for this, they decided to recycle their speeches instead and I found myself listening to the same speeches as last month, last week and yesterday over and over again! So despite trying hard to be resource efficient, the Summit still failed as it wasted one valuable incredibly valuable resource: Our time!
While most of the specialised presentations were interesting and highlighted some important issues in the sector, the speeches by the Ministers and the President were a complete waste of time! I understand that it was important for the Summit to have the honourable President Jacob – Jay Z - Zuma “throw his weight behind calls for a green growth path, which involved job creation through environmentally friendly initiatives”, but unfortunately the President was not only running late (waste time once) and spoke incredibly slowly (waste time twice), but also had no idea what he was actually talking about (waste time three times). I believe that not many people – apart from the poor journalists – actually listened to a word Jay Z said, which is probably why, when a speaker asked the next day who had said the following:
"We must be able to prove that faster economic growth can be achieved alongside the sustainable management of our natural resources"
no one knew that these wise words were spoken by the honourable President less than twenty four hours ago… Ouch!
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