It takes two to tango (Episode One)

Last year I was with a couple of friends when we came across a photography exposition by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. It was a series of pictures taken from the air, showing landscapes from all five continents… perhaps you found it in your city too, it’s been all around the world. This photographer is part of a foundation called GoodPlanet, that seeks to rise public awareness of social and environmental issues to which we are all exposed. Some of the pictures had comments related to sustainable development, and one of them caught my attention: it said that if everyone on Earth had the same lifestyle as people in the Western World, we would need at least two extra planets to sustain ourselves.

So-called green-issues and climate change have been hot topics for a while… NGOs were the firsts rising their voice, then Governments and companies started to show their concern. If you are not part of a nonprofit, a government officer or an executive there’s one role you cannot escape from: you are a consumer. Regular people are becoming more and more aware of these kind of issues, and the way their consumption habits affect the environment and the use of resources. In fact, according to a 2007 McKinsey survey of near 8.000 people in eight countries (*), 87% of consumers worry about the environmental and social impact of the products they buy. Yet, no more than 33% of those same consumers said they were ready to buy green products or had already done so. Indeed, if you look at the supply side of the equation, most of the green goods on the market have very thin shares.

We have people that at least show concern for the environment on the one side, and companies producing green goods on the other side… that should be enough for the most basic model of economy, right? What is lacking, then? Apparently, information -the third essential element for the perfect market model-: a 2007 Climate Group study discovered that two-thirds of US and British consumers cannot name a single green brand. This implies that companies don't do enough by producing environmental friendly goods or reducing the carbon footprint in their operations.

I kind of like the writing-in-episodes way of posting, so I’ll try to analyze this phenomenon in a couple of entries. And by the way, since one of the main inspirations for these posts was that comment on the photo exposition, I’ll use the pictures that I liked the most as illustrations :)

(*) Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States.