Setting the Scene
The Scenario
Footnote
Conclusion

In the year 2000, global business leaders meeting at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, anticipated that climate change would be the greatest challenge they faced in the 21st Century. They also decreed it a challenge to which they could respond with leadership. In 2001 the latest report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scared many around the world with detailed forecasts of the region-by-region impacts of global warming. In 2001 the new Bush Administration in the US killed off the Kyoto Protocol. Then in 2002, at Rio+10 in Johannesburg, governments again had to admit their abject failure in addressing planet-wide environmental decline. By 2005 it was transnational corporations, not governments, which were leading the way in tackling global warming. At Davos 2000+5, a target was set by the ever more pro-active WEF. It was to stabilise the Earth's atmosphere at double pre-industrial revolution CO2 levels by 2050, while maintaining strong economic growth and raising the quality of life for all people. Big business led, but national governments, international agencies and civil society in general embraced the mission. By 2030, much had changed.

The location is a HomeHaven in a typical US city of its era. The HomeHaven, accommodating about 2,000 people, is a fraction of the size of a normal 20th Century suburb. It has a skeleton professional administration and services staff to oversee day to day running of the community, with the heavy lifting work being done by service providers who come from the private sector. Staff and the private contractors are guided by the wishes of the people whom they serve. The people don't just vote once every three or four years and then take what they get from their elected representatives. They vote on-line every day on significant issues, with a 75 percent majority required to action decisions without further debate. And as consumers, they vote on brand names and corporate reputation every time they make a purchase. But all of that is pretty ho-hum in this day and age.

The workings of democracy are not the only the thing that has changed. A time traveller arriving from the late 20th Century (note: time travel is still in the realm of science fiction in 2030) would be struck first by the streets. Or, more accurately, where the streets used to be. Walking, cycling, electric scooters and small, silent, fuel cell powered delivery vans and public people movers are the main forms of mobility within the HomeHaven. But they occupy far less road space than vehicles did in the old days, when cars dominated the streets, and when urban society was built around them. A lot of former street space is now owned collectively by the HomeHaven community, and accommodates gardens, cafes, sport and leisure facilities and convenient clusters of service and sales booths. Average population densities in the new suburbia are about 15 people per acre, a figure that lends itself to public transit options and the better integration of transport and land use planning.

There are of course still major roads, even motorways. But they fill the spaces between HomeHavens, and assist movement between cities. Many people don't own a car outright, although pooled ownership is still quite common - with parking centres located on the perimeter of each HomeHaven. Non-car owners have no trouble hiring one from their local mobility interchange centre whenever they need one. Most of the time, however, it is easier to use public transit options such as train and bus - or not to travel at all. Immobility can be a very productive option in an advanced Internet world. For example, persistently high oil prices have made air travel rather pricey, even for corporate types. Broadband video technology now makes virtual meetings seem incredibly realistic - wherever in the world the participants are physically located. In many ways, bandwidth is far more important than road width ever was. Of course, people still love to get out of the house and the HomeHaven on occasions. But they can choose when, and make the most of it.

Looking back, there were two big drivers for the rise of HomeHavens as the preferred form of civic administration. The first was the deep desire even within relatively privileged communities in America and other developed countries for safety and security. This desire showed up time and again in those quaint focus groups that corporations and political parties liked to do before continuous on-line polling really took off around 2007. The other key driver was the quest for sustainability - incorporating economic, environmental and social factors. By the start of the 21st Century most people had accepted the message that the planet was in trouble ecologically, and that humanity's success as a species was in danger of collapsing along with the eco-systems that sustain all life on Earth. People needed solutions, and fortuitously big business decided it was profitable to give consumers what they had to have.

In the first few years of the new century and new millennium it was hard to discern much happening at all, although climate change moved to the top as an issue for Americans after Miami was devastated by serial hurricanes in 2002 and 2006. Thousands died, and rightly or wrongly, Americans blamed global warming. Oil prices rose sharply in 2000 and never dropped back to the lows of the late 1990s. Price, and growing environmental concern, meant that alternative fuel technologies quickly became the biggest focus of competition between rival car manufacturers. All of these were factors. But the real key was the critical mass for change that had been building up for decades in the community.

Change does not occur in a linear fashion. Sometimes it can seem that nothing will ever change. Then a huge wave sweeps all before it. Dictators like Indonesia's Suharto fall almost overnight. The Berlin Wall comes down. North Korea comes out of isolation. The lies of tobacco companies unravel in multi-billion dollar lawsuits. Oil companies and big utilities start to become energy companies. Car companies redefine their core business as mobility. (In 2030, there are four great mobility corporations in the world; two US-based, one Japan-based and one European conglomerate. They are the Ford Mobility Company, General Mobility, Toyota Move Corp. and Pan Europa Transit. Many businesses and communities contract one or another of these giants or their agents to coordinate and/or supply all of their mobility needs, and they in turn promote proprietary models for developing and running mobility-efficient HomeHavens and corporations.)

A change masterstroke was the reshaping of suburban shopping malls, which have become the greatest of all focal points for people wanting to escape the home and the HomeHaven. The massive areas of land devoted to car parks were needed for the expansion of entertainment facilities. So car parks were largely shut down and malls and major retail chains competed for customers by providing transport options with enough flexibility to meet most needs. The smart ones developed vast underground transport interchange centres, making their malls into mobility hubs for dozens of surrounding HomeHavens. Once again, the mobility companies were major players. In the US, the alliance of Walmart, Ford and America Online was a powerful force in catering for consumers both in cyberspace and in mall space, whether they wanted to shop or to play.

The fact is that the case for pursuing sustainability had become beyond challenge by the time that celebrated authors Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins published their classic book Natural Capitalism in 2000. Among other things, this book made the point that if everyone on Earth wanted to live like Americans - and consume resources and pollute like Americans - then humanity would require a further two planets. By 2030 a manned mission has been to Mars, water has been found beneath the surface and a NASA/European Space Agency consortium is planning a biosphere development to establish a permanent base on the red planet. The reality for earthlings, however, remains one of having little choice but to look after their home planet a lot better, and to live more efficiently. Sustainability, in essence, is another way of saying survival. Funnily enough, once the challenge is put in these terms, society as a whole finds it a lot easier to understand that there are smart, clean growth options to do more with less. And business seizes on opportunities instead of decrying the cost of regulation.

By 2010, the developed world had put a cap on much capital and resource intensive development. The focus turned sharply away from monolithic public and private infrastructure projects (except the knowledge intensive kind). No more big power stations, no more big dams and no more big motorways. It was a challenge, but the solutions business was huge, and this drove the economy to new heights as the crude nexus between growth and the ever greater consumption of non-renewable resources was finally broken. Existing infrastructure was retained and enhanced in most cases, and there were still many new projects where the cost/benefit analysis and the sustainability screening were overwhelmingly positive. The Internet and associated technologies and businesses were major contributors to low energy-use, low-emission growth in the economies of OECD nations. Many of the best sustainable outcomes were generated by solution "cluster groups", membership of which included corporations, research institutions and NGOs. One of the most famous - the Smart Opportunities Summit (SOS) - involved DuPont, Ford, BP Amoco, McKinsey, Citibank, MIT, the World Resources Institute and Greenpeace, among others.

In the developing world, implementing cleaner development options was much easier than many had anticipated. In many ways, developing sustainable cities from the ground up on green-field sites was much easier than was the retro-fitting of America. Once the big corporations stepped in to assist governments in Asia and elsewhere to guide growth down sustainable paths, progress was surprisingly rapid. Countries like China and Vietnam, for example, proved willing to accept that the "Bangkokisation" of their cities with traffic gridlock and air pollution was not the best of futures. Mobility companies devised full service offerings to city and nation builders covering vehicles, transport modes and networks, bandwidth alternatives and land use planning.

One significant breakthrough arose from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development's Sustainable Mobility project, which began in 2000, under a steering committee made up of General Motors, Shell and Toyota. As a way of showcasing the project's "out of the box" thinking on mobility, a second phase was launched to transform vision into performance in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital. Instead of allowing the old city's history to be swept away by cars and road-builders, a wide-ranging alternative mobility strategy was developed in partnership with the city administration and the national government. The mobility solutions pioneered in Hanoi have been applied in hundreds of growing cities throughout the developed world, in a series of private/public, First World/Third World partnerships.

HomeHaven-style residential areas also are being designed for developing countries, with tailoring to match each region's cultural characteristics and spending capacities. A global network of HomeHaven proponents helps to channel good ideas around the world, along with warnings about how things can go wrong. Many HomeHavens compete in sustainability quests at local, state, national and international levels, with categories including safety and security, livability, mobility efficiency, energy efficiency, water use minimisation, recycling and net-working. Most have sister community ties to their rural equivalents, the FarmHavens, and small wilderness area-based communities, called NatureHavens. These relationships often extend to formal arrangements for home swapping, tourism, trade and mutual support and advocacy - all of which have mobility implications. People in the cities, especially, love these personal connections with rural and natural communities. It helps them to understand how the footprint of their lives affects everything else. First World communities also often have relationships with one or more Third World communities.

Technological advances and reducing economies of scale have allowed the decentralisation of many services, with big energy and water utilities being one of the most obvious casualties. Much energy is now generated by increasingly less expensive solar panels, most homes catch rainwater to augment reticulated supplies, and most household effluent is treated within HomeHavens, mixed with stormwater in large underground reservoirs, and recycled for non-potable purposes. There is also a remarkable amount of wildlife in many residential areas, thanks to fashion turning firmly away from keeping domestic cats and dogs, and towards planting appropriate native trees and shrubs (not to mention the lack of fast-moving vehicles). All things considered, these 21st Century communities are nice, clean, safe places to live and most project a strong sense of civic pride and harmony. The high numbers of tele-commuters and the range of services available close-at-hand means that the ex-streets are busy most days, and well into the evening. Many people have found that putting money into local amenity is far more rewarding than owning cars.

The walled security estates that were becoming so popular among siege-minded wealthier citizens in the late 20th century were not required in reality. HomeHavens do a much better job. Strangers always stand out, and while most if not all communities welcome visitors, the local "neighbourhood watch" is always vigilant. Occasionally older citizens who remember old-style suburbia get talking about the urban transformation of the past two or three decades. There are fond memories of the times when just about everyone owned a car, and of the sensation of autonomous mobility that this gave to people. Then someone recalls the carnage on the roads that killed people, pets and wildlife. Another chips in about the way that major roads cut whole communities in half, and how cars everywhere made parents paranoid about children riding their bicycles in the street, or even walking to school. Everyone recalls traffic jams, and on the bad days, gridlock. There's animated discussion about how car companies spent billions on developing alternative-fuelled, less-polluting vehicles, without having any answer to congestion. Most agree it was always illogical to think that the car would rule forever.

By 2030 emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities globally have been reduced by an amazing 40 percent below 1990 levels, an outcome that puts the Davos 2000+5 resolution within reach, although it will still be a stretch. Few would have believed it possible, and in truth it could not have been done without harnessing the power, adaptability and profit motives of the private sector. Stabilising the atmosphere at double pre-industrial levels of CO2 still means significant global warming, sea-level rises, changing winds, new weather patterns, more climatic extremes and a variety of devastating consequences. Going beyond a doubling, however, would have meant even more catastrophic impacts for people and nature. It has been decided that 2050 will be marked by the greatest celebration the world has ever known, to be called Carbonfest. Party plans are being made already.

No one can predict the future. But nor is the future pre-determined. So we can work to create a better one. Let's assume, for a moment, that the above scenario does have a modest connection to reality. What would a vehicle manufacturer do now to get in touch with this version of the future?

Here are some random thoughts:

• Bite the bullet on embracing "mobility" in the company branding
• Engage with critics of the car industry and the road lobby
• Dodge bicycles and scooters in inner-city Hanoi
• Explore the concepts of productive immobility and mobility efficiency
• See climate change as an opportunity
• Drive in Bangkok in the peak hours
• Explore new corporate relationships
• Assemble a team of the world's best transit-focused urban planners
• Have the team desktop design a HomeHaven (green field and retro-fit versions)
• Understand the synergy between safety, security and sustainability
• Scour science fiction literature and films for transport mode ideas
• Ask staff about the future they a) see and b) want for the company
• Work with governments, rivals, NGOs etc for big picture solutions
• Catch public transport in Vienna
• Encourage Asian and European influences within global corporate structure

June 2001