Earth Hour Bright in Darkest Africa

8:30pm Saturday 28 March 2009 and NOT so dark at the bottom of Africa. Nor in Sydney nor London for that matter. Earth Hour South Africa, as the photo suggests, was looking a tad too bright! What change did we observe in our unscientific survey from Table Mountain overlooking the Cape Town CBD? The Cape Town provincial government and city offices were dark [yes, there may be other explanations than energy saving!]. The only visible change at 20h30 CAT [Central African Time] was the ABSA building logo going dark, perhaps because ABSA [JNB: ABSP] is now majority owned by Barclays [LON: BARC], and the degree of coordination was good.

What “beacons” kept shining vaingloriously under southern skies? From our perspective, not much about the city changed, with the amber glow of incandecent and the blu-ish light of neon strung around CPT as usual. After the speeches by African politicians and with South Africa representing Africa into the G20 and climate change negotiations heading to Copenhagen in December 2009, one hoped for major Parliamentary action. Underwhelming… What of the corporate players? Most easily spotted – there were others we did not spot – were some brands making the wrong statement in the African night sky:

• FNB [First National Bank], which uses an iconic African acacia as its corporate identity
• LG, the South Korean electronic goods manufacturer with the tagline “life’s good” which did trumpet its Earth Hour in Malaysia
  
• Southern Sun, on top of the Cape Sun, touted green credentials last October
  
• Nedbank, a billboard for the “green bank” storeys high downtown, which figures, because they had ZERO Earth Hour coverage on their busy wesbite.
  

Oops?! Nedbank [JNB: NED] must have been feeling awkward come Monday, what with having pitched their positioning on the JSE SRI Index in April 2008, hosting the Green Mining Awards, and being the bank with the affinity program for customers tied to WWF SA called Green Trust. Motivating a major global financial institution to action is a logistical mountain, as JP Morgan Chase Earth Hour PR illustrates in defining what it can and cannot do. Reminds me of the story from a mate in Corporate Responsibility at ANZ bank in Australia. As head of the Earth Hour project around 2007 she had plans in place to cut lights in the large ANZ [OTC:ANZBY; ASX: ANZ] headoffice building in Melbourne BUT could not get her facilities people to guarantee the huge neon signage crowing the building to go dark. Unperturbed, and in superb Aussie “can-do” fashion, she had on stand-by a colleague or two with a large hatchet and some rubberized boots! No way that light was shining at 8:30pm! One gets a sense for the drama watchng the video of Earth Hour Cape Town mayor Helen Zille doing the big switchoff, and the relief of "oh, it worked!". Things have moved on sufficiently that this year the ANZ-sponsored ANZ stadium, a major in Australia, voted to switch off its external branding lights. See the list of participating Australian banks.

Another icon for sustainability best practice in Africa is Woolworths [JNB: WHL], the premium retail store. It was rated best in class for sustainability, and signed to the WWF water neutral initiative, has a sharp Eco-Efficiency award programme for suppliers, and forthcoming Woolworths Sustainability Index is yet to be posted at http://www.woolworthsholdings.co.za/sustainability/sus_index.asp. Woolworths Earth Hour activity hooked directly to employees at head office in CPT encouraging a big switch off AND offering a discounted CFL swap - up to five bulbs. Stores tried some ideas, but emails to customers only focused on the weeks' special deals, so maybe they missed an extra step to magnify impact. The WLH notice read:

Woolworths supports Earth Hour: For one hour, millions of people will switch off their lights across the globe in support of Earth Hour to raise awareness on saving energy. Saving energy is an important part of our Good business journey and we encourage all colleagues to participate by turning their lights off for an hour. Earth Hour is a World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) initiative. On 24 and 25 March you can change your incandescent light bulb for an energy saving light bulb, courtesy of Woolies and Eskom. This will save you money and help to reduce energy usage. This is a small way for each of us to participate in our Good business journey. Woolworths is targeting a 30% relative reduction in energy usage by 2012. When: 24 and 25 March from 09:00 - 13:00 Where: Woolworths house, foyer. Please note that we can only exchange a maximum of five light bulbs per person. Remember to support Earth Hour on 28 March from 20:30 to 21:30. P Consider the environment - do you really need to print this email?

Earth Hour is one of those tipping point type efforts, the ones where a small item at the right point of leverage creates some kind of systemic change. Gladwell made it common jargon with business types early this century. Think of the first time you saw a cellphone that was more mobile telephony than brick or a music player as seamless as the second generation iPod. In the same category we recommend to you Nudge. The current thinking person's book – Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness [good timing, boys!] – relies less on regulation but suasion as a driver. Earth Hour, one of the better things to come out of Australia, aims to use just an hour as a window to a different future, highlighting the a raft of environmental issues by reversing the glaring trend to burn energy to light up the planet [roasting marshmallows as in Madam & Eve is optional!, see cartoon above]. WWF is the enviro NGO which is held in high esteem globally, is behind the idea since the Australian affiliate moved onto it in 2007. WWF helped popularize it in the US, Europe and Africa through local affiliates. Even Brunei joined in this year with mosques covering ecology in the Friday sermon. Brunei was the sixth largest per capita CO2 emitter in 2004, and always worth a punt in your geography quiz - Q: which continent is Brunei on? The first-ever OPL cohort covered Earth Hour in our review of international awareness and advocacy tools on the inaugural WWF One Planet Leaders programme in Switzerland in 2007/8. Earth Hour 2009 aims to "reach more than one billion people in 1000 cities around the world, inviting communities, business and governments to switch off lights for one hour at 8:30pm on Saturday March 28 and sending a powerful global message that we care enough about climate change to take action".

Chicago Tribune included some beautiful shots, see Bern cathedral after 8:30pm CET. The ultimate photo-op would not be darkness at night, a reversal of the classic artificial “world at night” photo from the NASA project to plot urbanization which we often use to describe systemic approaches and regional differences to sustainability+investment and sustainable development. That photo replaces thousands of words. It reflects the sustainable development footprint and challenge, as well as being useful to quickly pinpoint critical footprints for Sinclair & Company in SA, USA and Switzerland. It is a little harder to pinpoint Harare, for example. Earth Hour works on local time, so the rolling blackout kicks in according to international timezones [an arcane system worthy of another blog another day] from 8:30-9:30pm local time.


Things Go Bump in the Dark

Certainly the WWF and Earth Hour South Africa team had great marketing reach, and some big brand names as participants. In Cape Town, the iconic Table Mountain went dark – in the same way that peer emerging market major Brazil had the lights on the Christ statue in Rio de Janiero go dark - see some great photos and comments on GlobalVoices. Unlike the Sydney Opera lights apparently, bad form, Oz. Pop radio DJ Fresh on 5FM had some useful suggestions for the young and virile with a dark Saturday night hour to kill.

Even the most exclusive CPT eateries interrupted diners to explain the lights would be cut for the hour – but that’s never a problem where an extra candle as to ambience and the grill is gas-fired. In the streets the “grass-roots” approach in this emerging market as always relied on the lamppost signs strapped up pitching the idea, in between the election posters. Random support came through using the local Idols to spread the word, as the SA Property blog did. The Earth Hour Facebook group had 859,516 members, and blog Greenmarket covered the myriad other electronic marketing approaches [never did get the BB download though...] including photo stream on Flickr. With all this global coordination reminding me of the all-time greatest worldwide brand – Y2K – one wonders how the branding specialists will one day hence come to rate Earth Hour as a global brand?

The UN SG endorsed the effort [but here the earlier comment regarding public offices and darknesses echoes[!]] and one of the fine old twentieth century institutions, Baden-Powell’s Scouts had action at community level. But what difference does it make? As a global phenomenon it was open to interpretation. In South Africa the Mail&Guardian Thought Leadership blog [the editors feeling a little lofty the day they launched it, mmm?] the hopes were high, but Bridget McNulty’s view from Signal Hill matched ours from the slopes of Devils Peak: underwhelming. In the most environmentally-sensitive city on the continent. Check some of the Comments to Bridget's posting Earth Hour: A Little Underwhelming... which reflect the ambivalence to this form of social action, and in the contradictions in creating change which in itself uses energy. Even 1970s era environmentalists at National Post add some contra-wisdom.


Enter the Investors

My interest as always is to probe: where are the investors? No, one will never find a line-item for compliance with Earth Hour in the Green Century Mutual Fund from Boston, or the GS Sustain index from London, nor the RIAA certification. Not even in the WWF International’s own green investment product run from international headquarters by Chiew Chong, the Living Planet Fund, offered for sale as an OEIC out of Luxembourg to European clients. Australian industry website Ethical Investor posted the event, But a rough poll of some leaders in investing integrating ESG factors had at best an ad-hoc, personal approach, as opposed to a coordinated, strategy one would expect from sophisticated knowledge-based service industries. A simple list of investment/financial Earth Hour participants in Africa were:

• ABSA
• Coris Capital
• Coronation Fund Managers
• Discovery
• Investec
• Liberty Group
• Metropolitan
• Momentum
• Nedbank
• Old Mutual
• Sanlam
• Santam

The Earth Hour event juxtaposed timeously with the Principles for Responsible Investment [PRI] annual assessment submissions due 31 March 2009. As my experience reflected when working with the PRI annual assessment 100-odd questions on making the six principles of the PRI happen, it is easy to put up some aspirations with guidelines and waving a flag. Many of the PRI’s key signatories share the discomfort. It is much harder, but yet so much more impactful, to measure the outcomes and net impact of the driven behaviour. Earth Hour is just an event. But maybe it should be a line-item along with the other 100 questions for investors. It does at least offer the advantage over the 100 other data-points: complete transparency and immediate accountability in real-time. Inaction leading to reaction from consumers, observers, and investors, with reputation sensitivity driving future action.

Earth Hour, as some beautiful photos attest, was no doubt a success. WWF has done well, and partly by not hogging the spotlight putting the issue above the WWF brand. It is obvious that the symbolism is not enough, as BusinessWeek suggests through it's guest commentator, with interesting Comments. Earth Hour points participants toward the major Copenhagen conference and the Species Report. It is but a moment, not even 10% of a day/night cycle. The next obvious anniversary date upcoming is Earth Day. More symbolism and action/inaction sure to follow. Like all ceremonies and rituals, sometimes useful for impact, but at least useful for planning the diary.

Will Earth Hour 2009 nudge the thinking further along the learning curve, and will the youth remember it when they next come to make investment decisions?