As an academic deeply interested in understanding the changes that business will need to make to tackle climate change and other aspects of moving to a sustainable society, I'm very pleased to be teaming up with Guardian News and Media (GNM) to form the Sympact project, carrying out research on the future sustainability strategy of the news and media sector.
GNM has a reputation for leadership in engaging with sustainability, such as their award winning annual Living our Values audit, and I hope that our work together will continue to further push the boundaries of understanding and action.
But if GNM is doing so well, why not just rest on its laurels? In my view, the key reason is disruptive change. There are two significant business disruptors which the company is facing.
Firstly, the digital transformation of the news, media and publishing industry. We as a nation are consuming news and media in a very different way from 20 years ago. Online news browsing is replacing or supplementing both newspaper reading and getting news from the TV and radio. When online, news consumption becomes more multi-media, taking in text, image, audio and video.
Furthermore, mobile devices such as 3G phones, tablet computers and eReaders mean that people can access news and entertainment almost anywhere. All these trends suggest a move away from traditional printed media.
However, there are also changes in print technologies which could have an impact on this trend. Costs of digital printing are continuing to go down, meaning that it may become commercially viable to distribute the printing of newspapers and magazines closer to, or at the point, of purchase. As speed of print increases, this could be carried out on-demand, and produce personalised editions of newspapers.
Secondly, and perhaps less obviously at the moment, the disruption to the economy and society that climate change, and our response to it, is bringing. As Thomas Stewart, the editor of Harvard Business Review, said - '…environmental issues aren't a fad, climate change isn't just an emergency; like globalisation it is a force that will shape and reshape the business landscape for decades to come.'
Facing up to climate change and other environmental emergencies such as peak oil, water depletion, land-use changes and biodiversity loss will transform society both in the UK and globally. How, and at what speed, we cannot know with certainty. Perhaps it will be a well-planned and steady transformation over decades. Or, depressingly, perhaps more likely based on current evidence, it will be a frantic last-minute dash to cope with the impacts and push through the changes needed.
Both of these transformations will impact the Guardian's business, and both mean that GNM needs to look to the future to inform both its sustainability and business strategy. Approaches used now are important, but the changing business landscape means that GNM may look very different in ten years time - and so its sustainability impacts, too, may be very different.
As these changes take place, it will affect the energy use and environmental impact of the news and media industry - something that GNM is committed to understanding and minimising as much as practically possible. To understand how this might happen, plan for it, and make changes to reduce it in advance, there are a number of areas we need to explore.
Firstly, how does the environmental footprint of one method of delivering news compare with another? For example, is buying and reading a newspaper more or less energy efficient than accessing a number of articles online? How does the energy used to manufacture and distribute the newspaper compare with the energy used by the computer to browse the online version, the data centres to upload it, and a small share of the manufacture and disposal of the computer?
However, this alone is not enough, because the new delivery mechanisms change people's behaviour. The move to digital may mean that people access more video and audio files, which are larger in size than standard web pages. How much more energy consumption will this result in?
Will technical advances and social factors mean that people upgrade their devices often? Also, will the number of devices people expect to have proliferate, as they purchase separate home PCs, laptops, tablets and eReaders, or will a small number of devices provide all the functionality people need?
And what of the role of paper? A friend of mine, a former researcher at Apple, believes that computer devices will never match the 'affordances' of paper - there are always things you will want to do with paper that will not be possible on digital devices. Can eReaders or tablet computers replace books? Will people stop picking up the Metro as they enter the tube station, and instead flip through a digital Guardian on their iPad?
Also to consider are the risks that broader sustainability challenges may bring? How might energy prices and carbon trading impact the viability of GNM future business models? Will shortages of rare earth metals mean that the digital devices some of these new business models require become far more expensive to manufacture? Will a combination of increased demand from a growing educated world population and reduced supply due to forest protection measures mean that paper increases in price?
We can't forecast the future, but we can prepare for it. We are adopting a scenario-based approach, developing a number of scenarios of how the business may look thanks to digital technology. The scenarios will be developed in partnership with stakeholders within the Guardian, who are providing us both with objective data about current operations and reader trends and subjective opinions about how things may develop in future years.
This is deeply valuable input, but we plan to cast the net wider, and 'crowdsource' evidence and opinions around possible futures. We will be blogging about our thoughts and findings as we go along, and will be interested in the views of readers and evidence they can point to both in support and in contradiction of our preliminary results.
We also plan to develop an online tool to present some of the scenarios to you to play with - you will be able to change the assumptions we make, alter our scenario models, see what different conclusions you might reach, and share your results with us and other online readers. In this way, we hope to collaboratively build models which are not based merely on our expertise and data sources, but capture opinions and evidence from a wider community.
I'm very much looking forward to the next two years of research together with our partners at GNM, and hope that you will join us on our journey.