An enterprising approach to the environment

Sir David King's aim is nothing less than to infuse environmental thinking into every government decision. 'I want to see that just as heads of governments are saying "We want to recharge our economies and get them flowing again, but we must control inflation", they are also saying "and we must reduce carbon emissions". Every sentence must contain that as a given.' 

Sir David, who made headlines in 2004 when he said that climate change was a more serious threat to the world than international terrorism, joined the University in January 2008 as founding director of the new Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. The post follows his seven-year stint as Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, during which he was credited with persuading the former Prime Minister Tony Blair to take a global lead on climate change. As Sir David's term of office came to an end, Vice-Chancellor Dr John Hood moved quickly to recruit him as head of a new environmental initiative at Oxford, proposed by financier and philanthropist Martin Smith and his wife Elise.

The Smith School, funded with a substantial benefaction of £10 million from the Martin Smith Foundation, will conduct research aimed at finding private sector solutions to environmental problems. With internationally recognised research already under way in many departments across the University, from the Environmental Change Institute to the departments of Chemistry and Engineering, the aim is not to reinvent the wheel. 'There is an enormous amount of really outstanding work in Oxford,' says Sir David, 'but people working in one lab are often unaware of what's going on in another. We hope to add value by pulling people together.'

The School aims to act as a 'hub', both locally and globally, to focus attention on the social, political and technological problems involved in reducing carbon emissions. Its research fellows will each offer 30 per cent of their time to a department of their choice, acting as ambassadors across the University. In their turn, members of other departments with active interests in the field are being invited to become associate fellows of the Smith School, while a programme of visiting fellowships will bring researchers from across the world. Once these activities are in place, and inspired by his experience of setting up foresight and horizon-scanning programmes while in government, Sir David plans to establish a multidisciplinary 'futures laboratory'. This will conduct futures programmes in specific areas of work, such as clean transport technologies, of direct interest to the private sector and to governments. The programmes will create future scenarios to identify risks and opportunities, and to help inform strategies for managing the future.

Sir David acknowledges that solving real-world problems has not traditionally been seen as the province of universities, particularly the older institutions. 'The Smith School is doing something that our university system is not really used to', he says; 'but there is a tremendous sense of need for this from the academics themselves – we've been amazed at the response we've had.'

Getting the corporate sector engaged is trickier, he concedes. 'Many chairs and CEOs are showing a desire to work with us, but they do need to work it into their business models.' The G8 decision to reduce carbon emissions by half by 2050 will not allow them to drag their feet, however. 'Who will take up the challenge? Those parts of the private sector that see this as an opportunity, that have the ability to move quickly and to seize the advantages emerging around low carbon economies. Those who don't understand what future legislation will bring to them will be in difficulty.'

The role of governments is critical in persuading businesses to look beyond short-term profits, and the Smith School will focus much of its work on national and international environmental governance. 'As Chief Scientific Adviser, I became very aware that the immediate future is what every government is concerned about', says Sir David. 'But because individuals do care about the kind of planet their grandchildren will inherit, and because individuals are voters, I don't think there are politicians who can afford to ignore this problem any more.' The biggest problem, however, is gaining global agreement. 'If one major nation does not play ball,' he says, 'then this whole thing will not work. It's almost inevitable that our smokestack industries will move to that large state, and we'll import the goods and the problem will not have gone away.'

One of the few regrets he has from his time as Chief Scientist is a failure to persuade the government to include the need to build new nuclear power stations in its 2003 White Paper (it eventually announced a new nuclear programme five years later). His insistence that nuclear energy must be part of the carbon-reduction equation has set him at odds with green groups that had otherwise feted him for his uncompromising stand on global warming. 'One has to revisit one's prejudices', he says; 'and my previous prejudice was not to be in favour of nuclear new build, because I could not see why one would take any risk at all. Now we are faced with a massive challenge to decarbonise our economy, and frankly we are not going to manage it without nuclear new build.'

Sir David is characteristically pragmatic about our ability to cope with the drawbacks of nuclear energy generation. The same optimism emerges from his recent book (with Gabrielle Walker) The Hot Topic, which explains the extent of the risks we face from global warming while also presenting solutions. 'We are capable of managing this problem in a scientific, technological and economic sense', he says. 'It's a question of whether we have the governance capabilities to deliver the solutions. It's a manageable and doable problem, so let's get on and do it.'