Month: January 2022

A Statement on Equity and Inclusion from the School of Earth Sciences

Posted on by r.d.pancost

Statement by the University of Bristol School of Earth Sciences Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Community Committee, adapted from Head of School Letter for the Athena SWAN Action Plan (2018)

We are immensely proud to be part of a discipline based on understanding our planet, how we live on it and our shared future. We are likewise proud to be part of a discipline that is inherently global and international, that not only invites but demands collaboration with all cultures.  However, it is a discipline partially founded in 19th century adventurism and it has long struggled with the legacies of toxic masculinity, colonialism and exploitation. Few departments had female academic staff until the 1980s; and even when appointed, they had to navigate a frequently toxic environment of harassment, microaggression and often overt aggression. Women were only allowed to join the British Antarctic Survey’s field station from 1986, emblematic of being locked out from many opportunities and pathways to academic achievement. The discipline’s track record with respect to racial and minority ethnic diversity and equity is similarly flawed, with no significant progress in racial diversity over the past four decades.

Consequently, we are pleased to see recent progress in our discipline, making important steps in diversification and gender balance and evolving from exploitation to co-production.  And we are especially proud to be part of the School of Earth Sciences at Bristol, where we have supported women, at all stages of their career, through PhDs and PDRAs to esteemed Fellowships and into Lectureships.  We now have near gender-parity in every part of the professional, technical and academic part of the school, and at every career stage, from students to the most senior staff.  Nearly 50% of our Professors are women, a balance surpassing the vast majority of STEM departments in the country.  Similarly, we have a large and visible LGBTQ+ community, embraced by our colleagues, and transforming the image of our discipline.

However, the legacies of our discipline’s origins run deep; and, of course, gender diversity is only one aspect of a challenge that is profoundly intersectional. We refuse to be complacent and our successes in some areas highlight our shortcomings in others. We therefore commit to four main Themes for Action: Visibility, Equity, Agency and Anti-Racism.

Visibility: Our female staff are global leaders, serving as Presidents of international societies, winning accolades and advising governments. They are also visible in our teaching and leadership. But we must enhance the visibility of the specific issues they face; it is astonishing that only in the year 2019 has our discipline begun to publicly discuss the challenges of having periods during field work.  Similarly, we need to raise their profile amongst young people, ensuring that the Earth Sciences is seen as an inclusive destination for young women choosing their degrees.

Equity: Just because we have achieved gender diversity does not mean we have achieved equity. We recognise the unwritten hierarchies of academia and how that stifles debate, protest and progressive change. We will empower the voices of all staff and students in the School to advance their careers and safely advocate for change. Our governance will be open and transparent.

Agency: Intellectual freedom is often touted as one of the great benefits of an academic career, but true agency and independence can be reserved to the most senior and privileged of us. Early Career Researchers, especially in a highly competitive job market, feel that they have little power; even Lecturers feel compelled to prioritise some efforts over others in order to be promoted. We have created fora and representation for our PDRA community, helping them initiate change and create their own opportunities. And we have led in University efforts to reform the Promotions framework, such that it will soon recognise a wider range of contributions.

Anti-racism: Despite our gender and sexuality diversity, we have very low BAME diversity.  It is a well-documented problem for the entire discipline – as well as the wider environmental community. We have few BAME staff and no permanent BAME academic staff. Our support for BAME staff and students has been inconsistent. We are committed to engaging more broadly with society, diversifying our recruitment at all levels, and ensuring a safe and empowering environment for our students and staff.

The EDI Committee and the School are proud of what we have achieved, from developing the careers of many amazing women to creating a safe environment for our LGBTQ+ colleagues and collaborating with race equality champions in the city of Bristol.  However, we recognise that much remains to be done and we are committed to that positive action.

We will do this through culture and process, through training and policy change. Where we lack the power to directly change policy, we will advocate for that change with the University, government and funders. We commit to this as individuals and as a School.

What is Forceful Stewardship?

Posted on by r.d.pancost

Since 2014 I have served on the Board of Preventable Surprises, a CIC devoted to challenging investors to better anticipate and address financial disasters arising from systemic risks such as climate change and biodiversity loss.  Founded by the inspiring Raj Thamotheram but supported by some of the world’s leading financial experts, it is dedicated to the concept of Forceful Stewardship, the active, disruptive and ethical (and occasionally radical) role that shareholders should take in their investments.  Crucially, we challenge large corporate and charity investors (including hedge funds and pension funds) to fulfill their legal obligations to their clients by adopting an active role in avoiding systemic risks either through shareholder engagement or divestment.  In doing so, we have widened the the ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) shareholder community.  But we also hold those investors accountable to their legal obligations and to their pledges, identifying patterns of inconsistent voting and problematic behaviour.

This is not an initiative I ever anticipated joining.  I am not an expert on finance and investment.  I am quite skeptical of the free market approach with which this project is inherently in dialogue.  I joined because it complemented the Divestment agenda of student colleagues at the University of Bristol and because it was an opportunity to modestly step into environmental activism and learn from that.

And it has achieved both of those goals.  Bristol was one of the first Universities to divest from fossil fuels, a journey bracketed by a 2015 pledge to carbon neutrality and the first academic declaration of a Climate Emergency in 2018.  Key to that was my involvement at PS and the insight it gave me into responsible investor behaviour. Organisations, including the University of Bristol, were countering the global divestment campaign by arguing, often cynically so, that more could be achieved by holding investments and serving as engaged stakeholders. However, few if any of them have the capacity – let alone the will – to act in such a manner. At Bristol, these discussions and an honest recognition of what we could achieve paved the path towards divestment as the ethical and appropriate alternative.

At the same time, Preventable Surprises helped me redefine the parameters of my own environmental activism, facilitating my shift from being a scientific expert politely contributing knowledge to policy debate but restrained from critiquing it to a far more radical view of directly challenging government failure to act on the Climate and Ecological Emergencies. In particular, it provided a gateway to activism because Preventable Surprises does not advocate for any particular solution or action, a more comfortable position for scientists who are reluctant to step outside of their area of expertise. Instead, PS advocates for investors to do no more than adhere to their legal obligations and their own pledges to ethical behaviour. My view towards activism has changed significantly over the past decade, and my involvement with Preventable Surprises has been central to that.

Below is some further information on Preventable Surprises and the Forceful Stewardship model it has championed for ethical investment.  And below that, some further personal reflections on what this approach can achieve and whether a more radical approach is needed. I think that I have probably given and learned as much as I can from this initiative.  I think that we are identifying the limits of what even the strongest free market interventions can hope to achieve.  I think I am ready for the next stage of my own social and environmental activism.  But responsible investment still has a crucial role to play.

From the Preventable Surprises website:

For many years, Preventable Surprises has been addressing financial disasters that investors could–and should–have seen coming. Concerns about BP’s safety record, the accounting practices of Tesco, sloppy mortgage lending–these were in the public domain for years before disaster struck. Preventable Surprises, a community interest company, is a ‘think-do’ tank that seeks to prevent, or at least mitigate, corporate and market implosions.

We work with a group of positive mavericks within the investment industry to persuade and cajole the financial sector to better address systemic risks. Using climate change as an example, we define systemic risks using three features:

  • They are pervasive and not confined to a sector or territory. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board found that 72 of the 79 industries in the SASB classification system are affected by climate change.
  • They are non-linear with unpredictable tipping points. The long-term climate transition will almost certainly be volatile and messy. Global temperatures and rainfall may rise incrementally on average but extreme changes will be localised and deadly.
  • They are inter-related, making it impossible to predict the likelihood of Black Swan events.

While regulators, the media, NGOs and consumers each have a role to play in building a more transparent and sustainable market system, most of the power lies with corporations and their investors. Preventable Surprises focuses on institutional investors because, through the trillions of dollars in assets under their management, they have enabled corporate and market dysfunction. While this may be unintentional, the continuing damage caused to investors and to ecosystems in untenable.

Long-term investors cannot use stock-picking or hedging strategies to avoid systemic risk. In the case of climate change, institutional investors’ end beneficiaries will pay the price as the extent of portfolio risk is revealed. That is why investors must mitigate systemic risk through forceful stewardship. As fiduciaries, they must go beyond private engagement to publicly vote for resolutions at AGMs that force companies to align with the 2°C scenario envisaged in Paris.

Forceful stewardship complements the normal approach to responsible investing – in which traditional investment decision-making is overlaid with a filter for environmental, social and governance issues – by focusing on the rights that investors have as owners. But forceful stewards also go beyond private engagements with investee companies, which lack transparency and are hampered by conflicts of interest. Many of us and those we work with are deeply pro market. But as experienced insiders, we know there are many reasons why the financial industry ignores systemic risks, such as climate change, until it is too late.

“Forceful stewards” engage with companies, and use their full influence to make business part of the solution to address systemic risks. They vote for resolutions to send a public signal and thus to drive deeper and faster corporate change. And forceful stewards also engage with all the other players involved in investment – from research analysts to investment consultants to regulators – to ensure they, too, play their part in addressing systemic risks.

In summary, a forceful steward does three things:

  1. Indicates in advance a willingness to vote in favour of resolutions requesting action to address systemic risks, and to vote against management if the company has repeatedly failed to take action to limit systemic risk.
  2. Makes it clear in private engagements with board directors and senior executives that box ticking will not be sufficient; results matter and should match the urgency of the situation.
  3. Requires fund managers, sell-side research, credit rating agencies, and investment consultants to review corporate disclosures and advise on portfolio implications. And advocates for essential regulatory changes that align incentives in financial markets with risk mitigation and long-term wealth creation.

Why do I personally think that Forceful Stewardship is so important?

Forceful stewardship is not a participation prize for showing up.  It is not box ticking.  It is not about empty gestures, many of which cannot be evaluated. It demands action. It centres accountability.  I joined in 2014 but writing this in 2022, I look back on nearly a decade of Climate Emergencies, Pledges, Commitments to Net Zero – and despairingly little action towards those.  Words must precede action.

Our most successful campaign was the Missing 60, in which we identified the 60% of investors who had voted against climate risk resolutions for US companies but in favour of near-identical resolutions for European companies – simply because the former opposed those resolutions and the latter did not.  That is not leadership.  That is not accountability.  That is not the action of a fund manager acting in the best, well-informed interest of their clients.

Forceful stewards do not sit on the sidelines or follow the crowds.

But nor do Forceful Stewards dictate the nature of action.  Climate change is a challenge, but no one has a monopoly on the solution.  Arguably, inferred assumptions of what those solutions must be has been a major part of its politicisation – political divides around science have arisen not from the science itself (although it is not free from critique) but rather from ideological divides around free market vs government intervention.  I have my own opinions about what is needed to tackle a challenge of this magnitude and they do involve ‘big government’ interventions and multi-state coordination, but Preventable Surprises is not the forum for sharing those views.  It demands action but is agnostic to the political, behavioural, financial or technological action an organisation takes; it only demands that the action be legitimately engaged with the nature and magnitude of the systemic risks an organisation faces.

This approach has given Preventable Surprises legitimacy and influence in surprising places.

However, it also exposes the limitations of any approach that is embedded within the free market rather than challenging its existence. Corporate actions can be legitimate responses to the climate emergency but replicate other sector sins; copper and lithium mining and major hydro-energy projects can damage the environment and perpetuate inequality just a much as climate change can.

Their are limits to what the free market can achieve because the one thing it can never do is return power and wealth to others at its own expense. In fact to do so is in direct contradiction of the Preventable Surprises core approach – demanding that companies recognise climate change because climate change is a risk to the investment.

Those businesses might change but they will always extract.

Some final reflections

Many of my colleagues are very pro free market.   Or more precisely, they are in favour of the most noble possible vision of the free market.  Preventable Surprises aspires to make the most of our current socio-political system.  And inevitably, any solutions that arise from Preventable Surprises’ interventions will be market-driven ones.

I do not share that optimism. Those of you who follow this blog or my twitter account know that I am not ‘pro market.’  On some days I am quite skeptical of capitalism and other days I am anti-capitalist.

But I currently live in a capitalist country and capitalist forces shape the world.  Forceful Stewardship is about making that system work as ethically as it can.  Like the fossil fuel divestment campaigns, we understand that we are in the game and so we play the game.  I do not think that market solutions will solve the climate problem – and even if they did, I suspect they would give rise to an equally exploitative and colonial ‘green’ energy economy – but we do what we can within the constraints imposed upon us.

That is something.  We all do our best to make the world a better place. I am proud of what we have achieved.

But these campaigns have served another purpose – and this is why they are now serving as a springboard for a step change for my own environmental activism.  Divestment and shareholder activism are exposing the limits of what our current socio-economic system can achieve.  In striving to make the free market behave as ethically as possible, they spotlight its limitations.

When even best practice and the most well-meaning actors fail to create an environmentally and socially just world, then we have run out of excuses for avoiding far more radical change.

 

Complex Cities in an Uncertain World

Posted on by r.d.pancost

My contribution to the Festival of Ideas sponsored Festival of the Future City 

Photo by David Iliff. License CC-BY-SA 3.0

Half of the planet lives in cities. By the middle of this century, that number will rise to nearly 75%, nearly 7 billion people. The decisions we make today will dictate whether those future cities are fit for purpose, whether they are just, sustainable, vibrant, resilient and pleasant. But those decisions must navigate an increasingly perilous web of urban complexity and global uncertainty.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr famously said,  ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future,’ a quote that recognises and subverts the very nature of the scientific endeavour. Scientists aspire to understand something well enough that we can predict what will happen under certain conditions in the future, whether it be a chemical reaction or nuclear fission – or administering a drug or raising interest rates. In fact, prediction is the basis for all decision makers, not just doctors and engineers but mayors, CEOs, teachers and you. Whether it is predicting when you will run out of bread or predicting whether a residential parking scheme will bring about a net positive change to a congested city, we all make decisions based on what we think is about to happen or will happen if we take an action. In a simple world, we barely need to think about these things because the pattern has been reproduced numerous times or the solution will clearly address the challenge.

But we do not live in a simple world. We live in a complex world – an astonishingly complex world in which the landscape is changing faster than our ability to map it.

People are complex: our emotions, motivations, desires and fears make us notoriously (and wonderfully) difficult to understand and predict. Society is complex: our communities, whether they be geographical, historical, ethnic or religious, interact in marvellously messy ways. And most of all, our cities are complex. Beautifully, fantastically, unpredictably, frustratingly and vibrantly complex. Cities represent tens or hundreds or even thousands of years of ad hoc expansion, destruction and redevelopment; the accumulation of technological and infrastructural strata, from ancient paths, to great roads, to modern electrical grids, to smart city digital networks; and vast demographic changes including an aging population, migration, globalisation and a frightening increase in social inequality.

That is just the complexity within a city, but cities are not isolated from the rest of the world. They are nodes within a vast and increasingly complex global supply chain on which we depend for everything from our food and electricity to our culture and entertainment.

And adding yet additional layers of complexity are our global environmental and societal challenges. We are warming the planet and depleting it of vital resources. Those would be challenging enough given the complex interdependencies that now define 21st century society. Unfortunately, global warming could change our planet in ways that are unique in human history and possibly geological history. We have not experienced and our models cannot fully constrain this uncertain world. Forecasts for rainfall patterns, extreme weather events or food production are fraught with uncertainty – and by extension, so are forecasts for political insecurity and financial markets.

How does the complexity intersect and overlap, how do these systems merge, either dampening or enhancing their collective impacts? How will climate change and food insecurity, for example, exacerbate inequality? We do have tools for navigating these complex systems – ranging from cognitive shortcuts in decision making to community histories to sophisticated models. However, those are almost all based on experience, and experience loses value when the ground rules are changed. Our vast experiment with the Earth’s climate and ecosystem – making our world not just complex but complex and uncertain – makes it harder for scientists to predict the future, decision makers to plan and individuals to act with creative and empowering agency.

Of course, complexity need not be bad. Complexity and change can bring about positive challenges, shaking us out of complacency and inspiring creativity. Perhaps even more inspiring, complexity could be harnessed as a tool for connection rather than isolation. Although our interdependence makes us particularly vulnerable to conflict or instability on the far side of the planet, it also makes us all invested in one another’s lives. This also applies to the urban scale as exemplified by Bristol is Open, in which an additional layer of complexity – a publicly shared digital infrastructure managed by a smart city operating system – could generate new platforms for social cohesion. It could be a new set of cross-city linkages, a digital commons, or a shared lab for city-scale experimentation in which all of us are the scientists.

Ensuring how our complex cities thrive in an uncertain world is a rather exciting challenge that will likely require a range of solutions. During the Festival of the Future City we will explore both what it means to be a citizen in a complex city, how we navigate that complexity both on a personal and societal scale, and the new technologies that create both new challenges and new opportunities. In some cases, we should avoid unnecessary uncertainty, such as potentially devastating climate change. In others, we should harness the social and economic opportunities it presents. But in all cases, we ourselves must change. A more complex world requires a more resilient citizen or community, one that is empowered to learn, to improvise and to create.