"To be honest, I'm here to recruit everybody in this room, everybody watching online, to join me in making a movement."
That's what Niall Dunne, chief sustainability officer at BT, said on stage at the 2014 Social Good Summit on Monday. The movement he was referring to? Giving sustainability a makeover, and making it so that younger generations come to expect it as the norm, not a goal.
"Anybody of the 400,000 people who marched in the streets [for the People's Climate March] yesterday realizes that we're starting to reach a tipping point. But we can't march and go home to ... our family lives as usual. We've got to make sure the pressure that represented on the streets ultimately drives a movement ... so that sustainability becomes the new normal," Dunne said.
Initiatives like the Montreal Protocol, nuclear power and hydro power are powerful in abating carbon, but as individuals, we're left wondering how we can make a difference ourselves.
And then we look at the fourth most effective way the world has abated carbon -- surprisingly, it was China's one-child policy, which avoided approximately 300 million births, according to Dunne, and abated about 1.3 billion tons of carbon.
"We're looking at nine billion people [in the world] by 2030, [and] by some people's estimation, 11 billion people by 2100," Dunne said. "What if those 300 million kids were born? What would we need to do to actually create an environment by which they just expected ... things to be seasonal [and] local, they support the circular economy just by instinct because it just makes sense, and the sharing economy, too?"
Ultimately, Dunne believes we need to move the world away from "conspicuous consumption to a much more conscientious, much more collaborative model for consumption."
Millennials, he said, make up the best demographic to do this.
"Why? Because they're already doing it: 84% of millennials -- and this is consistent all around the world -- would rather make a difference than achieve recognition in work," he said.
Millennials want to work for purposeful organizations and companies, he added. But with 1.8 billion millennials in the world, it's a difficult task to achieve scale in sustainability.
Much of the onus falls on big brands and technology companies, many of which are already incorporating sustainability into their business models (Dunne cites Unilever as an example). More businesses need to do this, and it makes sense economically, too, in order to cater to this demographic's demand (and their money).
But Dunne wants more ideas, and encouraged the Social Good Summit audience to use the hashtag #newnormal to discuss.
"I want to hear how we can get scale," he said. "I want to hear what's already happening to tap into the energy of millennials. I want to hear how we can make their voices be heard, and I want to hear how we can make their actions count.
"Let this be the start of a conversation."
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