CSR and soap bubbles

As we reported recently, our latest tracking data suggests that Indian consumers are proving to have surprisingly high expectations of companies' CSR, and don’t appear to share the increasingly cynical outlook of their Chinese counterparts.

One particularly intriguing – and perhaps counter-intuitive – finding was that Indian consumers are actually more likely to say they have heard or read about companies’ CSR activities than in most other countries we surveyed – 50%, compared to 30% globally. Of course, there may well be some over-claim here – but if not, maybe Indians have just been watching a bit more TV lately?

India’s Mint business newspaper reports that TV product placement is back with a vengeance in the subcontinent, citing Procter and Gamble’s recent promotion of its Shiksa CSR campaign around children’s rights via a storyline in a popular soap on the Star channel among its examples. And indeed, a GlobeScan colleague confirms that P&G’s efforts to raise the profile of its CSR haven’t gone unnoticed by the TV soap fans in her family in India.

Is this the way forward for companies wanting some credit for their efforts to do good? Maybe. But another trend we’ve noticed is an increasing tendency for people looking for information on what companies are doing to be more responsible to bypass companies’ own CSR messaging – reports, website content and the like – and look instead to independent online sources, including social media. CSR in sponsored soap storylines would appear to run counter to that trend. But as we've seen, the number of people aware of companies’ CSR efforts is relatively low, and hasn’t grown at all in four years. Maybe it’s not a bubble, and P&G are on to something with their soap strategy after all.

Rising expectations around CSR in India

It's sometimes asserted that corporate social responsibility is a luxury that is just too expensive for companies and consumers in the world's developing economies to worry about. Creating jobs and boosting GDP is, allegedly, all that matters.

Our latest tracking data on attitudes towards CSR in India suggests that this assessment is pretty wide of the mark. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of the Indian public say they want their government to force companies to go beyond their traditional economic roles and work to improve society, even if this means higher prices and fewer jobs. They're more demanding in this respect than the Japanese (55%), British (50%) or Americans (39%). Consumer attentiveness to CSR communications by companies also looks to be on the rise in the subcontinent. And while a highly successful company like Tata is picked out most frequently as a 'responsible company', concerns over labour standards also mean that it's the company that is most commonly mentioned as 'irresponsible'. Consumers, in other words, are conflicted - economic growth is transforming the lives of so many, but this doesn't mean that they're blind to the social and environmental costs that accompany it.

We've seen attitudes around responsible business in the world's other emerging economic superpower, China, become much more cynical in the wake of the Sanlu scandal, in which a highly respected producer of infant formula was found to have contaminated its products with melamine, and caused the death of several children. With faith in corporate leadership on the decline in India, companies are going to need to demonstrate credibly what they're doing to meet these heightened expectations, or risk government stepping in and enforcing a responsible approach to business.

Global governance: just a mirage?

With the number of intractable global problems mounting inexorably, an effective system of global governance has been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for many decades now. It may now be as far away as ever. After an amicable but somewhat ineffective G20 summit in Toronto, Philip Stephens of the FT points out that, now the immediate financial crisis has waned, the imperative for governments to come together and co-ordinate policy across borders has also diminished. Voters, he says, expect their national government to ‘shelter them from the storms’, and governments don’t want to admit that they can’t do so without help from outside, and so resist moves that would require them to cede sovereignty.

What’s interesting is the potential contradiction at the heart of public opinion on this issue that our data reveals. The political pressure from voters for visible, unilateral action that Stephens identifies is real enough. But in the latest wave of our tracking in late summer 2009 we saw a remarkable upswing in trust in national governments to act in the interests of society (as the chart below shows)– just at a time when those governments were being forced by circumstances to come together and co-operate in a way rarely seen before. Voters may not like the idea of ceding power outside their borders, but appear to like it when progress is made. Maybe governments need to take heart from this and be more honest with voters about the pooling of sovereignty that is needed to address many of the issues that most concern them.

But if the autumn of 2008 represented a high-water mark in cooperation among national governments, December 2009 and the failure to come up with any sort of adequate deal to address climate change at Copenhagen was surely a nadir. Our next wave of tracking of trust in government, due out later this year, will show whether the mini-boom in public confidence in governments has, like the aforementioned pot of gold, vanished into thin air as soon as it appeared.

Greenwash, and why it matters

Regular readers may recall that we've talked before about the perils of greenwash.

Here's some more evidence that it's a real barrier to sustainable consumer behaviour. My colleague Eric Whan, our Director of Environmental research, writes:

"We all have ideas about why sustainable consumption has not become mainstream despite all of the effort put toward that goal. Materialism, greed, product (in)efficacy, poor communications--all of these are at least partially valid explanations.

Published this month, the National Geographic / GlobeScan "Greendex" survey of consumers across 17 countries has found that while consumption habits of the average individual have become somewhat more sustainable in more countries than not, gains have been modest. As we at GlobeScan have long said, a broad gap exists between the values that people hold as individuals (green), and their behavior as consumers (not so green).

How to narrow the gap? To get some answers, we asked 17,000 consumers this very question directly. Many will consider this method a rather blunt measurement tool, but the survey question generated the most compelling results of the 2010 Greendex study.

As this chart shows, when asked to what extent ten different factors discourage them doing more for the environment than they do now, the top rated factor was the perception that companies make false claims about the environmental profile of their products. The second greatest obstacle was a belief that individual action is futile if governments and companies do not take action themselves. Less important barriers included conventional explanations such as cost, inconvenience, confusion, and a lack of green product alternatives.

So, if we are to conclude anything from the data, it is that corporate credibility and a lack of leadership in general are the priorities that must be first adressed by those who wish to further sustainable consumption. Thus the question arises: How? I'll leave that to you."

A see-through world

What makes a responsible company? It's a fair question. Terms such as CSR, sustainability and corporate citizenship are on everyone's lips these days. Even so, there is often a sense that they mean different things to different people.

But sometimes an issue cuts through. As the world economy attempts to put itself back on its feet, somewhat bloodied and bruised after the experience of the last couple of years, transparency is suddenly the buzzword du jour.

Our annual study of consumer views of CSR across 30 countries asks people to say what they consider to be the most important thing a company could do to be considered socially responsible. Treating employees fairly still tops the list, but behaving transparently and ethically is coming up hard on the rails – it was named spontaneously by just 8% of our global sample of consumers in 2005, 10% in 2008 but 20% this year. In the wake of the economic crash, when lots of apparently sound businesses turned out to have feet of clay, consumers increasingly want the whole picture about the companies they deal with, warts and all.

This is backed up by a Business Week survey of the world's top 100 brands, as Sustainable Life Media reports. Trust and transparency top the list of consumer concerns in 2009. The piece also makes the point that as well as expecting companies to keep them fully informed of what they're up to, consumers are quite prepared to use the opportunities the internet affords them to make sure that, when a company falls short, everyone knows about it.

We also share the assessment here that water use is going to be a big, big issue for companies over the next decade – and increasingly, one of the issues on which consumers will be expecting them to be transparent and lay their cards on the table. Water emerged as one of the most pressing issues in our survey of sustainability experts around the world at the end of last year, and our 15-country study of consumer views on the issue revealed that 72% considered water pollution to be a 'very serious' issue and 71% felt the same way about fresh water shortages.

Responsible water use is, in one way or another, a pressing issue for all sectors, not just heavy industry or beverages – and the way companies handle it is likely to be a litmus test of how they respond to the challenges of an increasingly see-through world.

The American nightmare: over at last?

Cast your minds back, if you will, to the 1990s. The USA had ‘won’ the cold war. The long economic boom was in full swing. Few had heard of Osama bin Laden, outside a coterie of Middle Eastern policy specialists, and even fewer took his threats seriously. America felt, for the most part, prosperous, vindicated and relatively invulnerable.

We all know what happened next – the contested presidential election of 2000 brought George W Bush and the neo-cons to power who swiftly disengaged from international initiatives like the Kyoto protocol, the dot-com bust gave a strong hint that US capitalism might not be as robust an institution as it looked, 9/11 reminded everyone that not everyone shared the American dream, Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded, and swiftly degenerated into running sores that looked like an object lesson in the consequences of hubris.

And sure enough, we saw the effect on global public opinion. We’ve just released the latest wave of our regular tracking with BBC World Service of the way people globally see the influence of different countries in the world. When we started tracking perceptions of US influence in 2005, the proportion of people across our 14 tracking countries who felt that it had a ‘mainly positive’ influence in the world stood at 38% - hardly stellar when set against the nearly 60% that saw Canadian influence as positive in that year. But as the body count in Iraq mounted, it dropped still further to 28% by 2007 – behind not only all the other major powers of Europe and North America but behind Russia and China, too.

That now looks to have been the low point. In the last year of Bush’s presidency positive views of US influence breached the 30% mark, continued to improve in 2009 and this year, with Barack Obama’s first term well underway, are now back at 40% and have overtaken negative views. The rehabilitation, if not complete, looks at least well on track. The USA has China in its rear-view mirrors once again in terms of global public perceptions.

What to conclude then? The upswing in positive perceptions of the US appears to date from the time when the country lost its appetite for projecting its strength in a unilateral way and started trying to mend fences with the international community. At the same time, the countries still felt to be projecting the most positive influence (Germany, Canada, the EU generally) are those that appear most fully committed to international cooperation, while as China’s economic strength and assertiveness has grown, its positive influence is felt to have declined. As far as international public opinion is concerned, it would appear, cooperation, stability and – perhaps - humility rules.

Politics: pass the salt, please...

Politics in Western democracies these days can seem like a somewhat insipid affair. Ideological cut-and-thrust is hard to come by, leaving political parties to argue about who is best placed to administer the state on the basis of a set of ground rules that are never seriously called into question. Lots of sound and fury masking a great deal of consensus.
Hardly surprising then, maybe, that electorates seem to have concluded that rather less is at stake than it once was and that election turnout continues to slip in many countries.
Ironically, a common complaint is that the truly contentious issues are left off the political agenda as being ‘too difficult’ for parties to handle. In Europe, the debate about continued EU integration is one that is often cited. Which MEP to vote for to voice opposition to the Lisbon treaty, for instance? And while at one level economic questions completely dominate the current UK general election campaign, and there are real differences of opinion between the competing parties as to the best strategy to adopt in the face of a ballooning budget deficit, there seems sometimes to be a conspiracy among politicians from the main parties not to talk in too explicit terms about the stark financial decisions facing the country and their consequences, for fear of giving too many hostages to electoral fortune.
Another ‘hot button’ issue is migration. The extent and effect of the inflow of migrants into Western economies is endlessly argued about, particularly within their popular media. But mainstream parties often try and steer well clear of taking too overt a position for fear on the one hand of alienating an electorate where anti-immigrant feeling is widespread, or on the other hand of being accused of ‘playing the race card’. The FT reported recently that votes for far-right parties were on the rise again in many countries, who find a ready audience for accusations that the mainstream parties are colluding to keep the issue off the agenda.
What’s clear is that the arguments advanced both for and against restricting immigration often rest not only on assertions about the relative value of immigrants to countries’ economies, but also to their culture. Those in favour of liberal immigration policies often argue that the exposure to other ways of life, value systems and beliefs that immigrants bring can be a huge benefit to a society and promote a sense of global citizenship. Our data suggests that, at the very least, opinion is sharply divided on this idea– our latest polling revealed that roughly equal numbers around the world see themselves as chiefly either global or national citizens, but that this isn’t strongly associated with numbers of immigrants – in largely monocultural China there appear to be rather more self-declared global citizens (70%) than in multicultural Britain (54%).
Whatever the truth, these questions of identity seem to be largely absent from political debate in most countries. The future health of democracy will surely be partly dependent on a braver generation of politicians who are willing to stand up and be counted, and tackle the issues that really define us all.

The net widens

The term ‘tipping point’ is wildly over-used these days (thank you, Malcolm Gladwell). A quick Google reveals that in the last few weeks it’s been applied variously to phenomena as diverse as the Greek budget crisis, rising CO2 emissions, The Hurt Locker’s Oscar prospects and the antics of the Chicago White Sox baseball team’s manager. Enough already, one is tempted to say.

Sometimes, though, something really does reach a certain level of ubiquity, passes a point of no return or breaks through into public consciousness in such a major way that the ‘t’ word is hard to avoid. Twenty years or so on from the birth of the World Wide Web, the internet may, definitively, be said to have ‘tipped’.

Our latest poll for BBC World Service reveals that four in five adults across 26 countries surveyed regard internet access as a ‘fundamental right’. That those who use the internet now overwhelmingly regard it as a sine qua non of modern life is less surprising than that over seven in ten of those who aren’t online - that is to say, who haven’t used the internet in the last six months - feel the same way. Yes, those on the other side of the digital divide do know what they’re missing. This raises big questions for governments around spending priorities as they try to bring down budget deficits.

The Economist recently reported that, with its 350 million users, Facebook now has more ‘citizens’ than all countries except India or China. Our poll found that more than half of all internet users enjoy spending their time on social networking sites, and the usage statistics bear this out. We may now be reaching a point where Facebookers have more in common with each other in the way they live their lives and their expectations of their community than they do with their non-connected compatriots. Again, a potentially huge shock for our elected representatives. Nationality is still a big deal in driving attitudes, of course – as our polling continues to show – but for how much longer?

Another straw in the wind – our latest polling on corporate social responsibility has suddenly recorded a substantial increase across many countries in the proportion who look online for information about how responsibly companies are behaving. This is the internet as the modern oracle – the definitive arbiter and repository of collective wisdom about all elements of life; companies, political parties, products and services, celebrities: work, rest and play.

A final and revealing statistic from our BBC poll – nearly half of the web users surveyed did not feel they could cope without the internet. And, let’s not forget, it barely existed twenty years ago. For better or worse, this looks like an evolutionary change. Homo hyperconnectedus, your hour has come.

Guantanamo: not closed, and no cigar for Obama

A year into his presidency, Barack Obama recently confirmed what most already realized: that he would fail to fulfil the promise given in his inaugural speech to close the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay within his first year of office.

Between the reluctance of representatives in Congress to accommodate Guantanamo detainees in their districts, the unwillingness of most of the US's international allies to receive detainees themselves and the political impossibility of repatriating them to countries seen as breeding grounds for terrorism such as Yemen – as well as an alarming lack of coordination between US government agencies, as BBC Radio 4 revealed last night - the problem has proved a real headache for the administration, and Guantanamo remains open.

The Obama administration has sometimes appeared to be out of step with US public opinion on some domestic issues in his first year – notably on healthcare reform – and this is an area where failure to fulfil an election promise may actually go down well with the electorate. A new CBS poll suggests that a majority of Americans oppose the closing of Guantanamo.

But other countries are likely to view the issue very differently. Guantanamo has been a running sore for the US's global image and the promise to close it was one of the most powerful symbols of change from the Bush years put forward by the new administration.

Our annual tracking of perceived country influence last year revealed a continued improvement in views of US influence by the global public as Obama took office. With this year's results due in a few weeks' time, we will see whether this improvement is persisting – or whether the latest disappointment has taken the shine off America's rejuvenated image around the world. Watch this space.

Unrealpolitik

Three weeks on from Copenhagen, and the blanket of snow currently enveloping much of the northern hemisphere hasn't obscured deep disappointment about the outcome of December's climate conference. No one appears to believe that the deal achieved is sufficient to make an impact on global carbon emissions and limit global warming to within safe levels.

Who's to blame? The list of candidates is long. The image of hapless hosts Denmark may take some time to recover. But what has become increasingly apparent over recent weeks is the lengths that the Chinese delegation were prepared to go to in order to avoid being subjected to a binding global agreement that might hamper their growth . Mark Lynas's account in The Guardian of the walkouts, the snubs and the last-minute scuppering of targets that did not even affect China makes depressing reading.

Given the level of ambivalence among the Chinese public about a strong global deal at Copenhagen (as we noted last month) this attitude by their leaders should not perhaps have come as a surprise. But, by any standards, theirs was pretty ruthless behaviour. That being the case, you might have thought that climate activists and NGOs would not be slow to point the finger?

Not so. Their ire has been directed almost exclusively at the countries of the developed West and, in the case of George Monbiot, at Barack Obama himself. The ink on the non-deal was barely dry before John Sauven of Greenpeace was referring to Copenhagen as a 'crime scene, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport'. Regardless of what Western countries might have put on the table (and in some cases it was substantial), and regardless of Chinese wrecking tactics, the environmental movement's mindset required that the West were identified as the villains of the piece.

Monbiot bemoans the failure of concerned liberals to take to the streets in large numbers to demand action on the climate from their leaders. But why are we surprised? In relentlessly accentuating the negative, ramping up the rhetoric to ever greater heights and allowing post-industrial guilt to trump a sense of what can actually be achieved, the environmental movement has itself been guilty of disempowering those who might have been supporters. If you portray the problem of climate change as unimaginably huge, decry any attempt to tackle it politically as a shameful betrayal and make no attempt to help people imagine how they might live fulfilling lives in a low-carbon world, don't be surprised if most of them bury their heads in the sand.

A few weeks before Copenhagen, I attended a gathering of NGOs, think tanks, labour organisations and corporates to discuss the 'green economy'. Talk turned glumly to Copenhagen, and I wondered aloud to a senior campaigner at one of the major environmental NGOs why his organisation wasn't concentrating its efforts on where advances could be made – lobbying multinationals, working with enlightened US states, championing new technologies. This was sniffily dismissed as 'realpolitik' and I was assured that 'doom and gloom is what we do best'.

This seems breathtakingly complacent to me. Our research shows that while NGOs are still trusted more than most institutions, trust in them is declining and people value them more for the aid and assistance they give than their campaigning work. Instead of peddling 'unrealpolitik', environmental NGOs – and the movement as a whole – should be taking advantage of the fact that they don't have elections to win every few years and play a positive role - building coalitions, articulating a vision, thinking the unthinkable, helping people to imagine what a different future could look like. It's never been more important.

Danish Blues

With the Copenhagen summit now underway, global attention is focused on the climate change issue, arguably as never before.

Our latest BBC World Service poll shows that – even in the midst of a recession – public concern over the climate has reached its highest level in the 11 years we’ve been tracking it. In total, 64% of those across the 24 countries we polled said they considered climate change a ‘very serious’ problem. In 13 of the countries we’ve been asking this question on a regular basis since 1998, and we’ve seen a sharp increase in concern on this measure from 44% to 63% overall.

Undoubtedly, until the buildup to COP15 started, the economic crisis had been keeping climate change out of the headlines, and the proportion of people in our polling naming the environment as the biggest issue facing their country dropped sharply. But while the economy was imploding, the steady accrual of alarming news about the climate has propelled concern about climate change – a problem which is, let’s not forget, complex, multi-faceted and (at least for now) somewhat abstract – to new heights. As our poll shows, there is substantial support for governments taking a strong line and supporting ambitious targets to fight climate change.

The UEA emails row may have provided a straw to clutch at for the sceptically-minded and the conspiracy theorists. But the likelihood is that any dampening effect that this has on concern will be temporary – particularly if we see a repeat of the scorching summers, hurricanes and snow-free winters that have become an increasing feature of the last decade.

What our poll also shows, however, is that leadership at Copenhagen will probably have to come from somewhere else besides the world’s two leading CO2 emitters, China and the USA. In both of those countries, concern has dropped back since 2007, and both are ambivalent about their governments pushing for a strong global climate agreement in Denmark.

Running on...

The 'peak oil' debate - are we or are we not about to reach the limit of our global capacity to extract oil from the ground, and what does this mean? - rumbles on without any sign of a resolution.

Peak oil proponents, like US investment banker Matthew Simmons, assert that most of the accessible reserves of oil will be drilled out within ten to fifteen years, and that the global economy - and particularly gasoline-dependent countries like the USA - risk decades of economic and social upheaval as they try to adjust to a less oil-thirsty lifestyle. Many disagree strongly. Some respected commentators, like former Shell chief economist turned senior UK politician Vince Cable, believe that the case has been overstated and that there is plenty of oil still in the ground - but point out that we risk becoming increasingly dependent either on supplies either from unstable neighourhoods such as Iraq, or from 'unconventional' - and expensive - sources like the tar sands in western Canada

And others still say that all of this still misses the point – that regardless of reserves in the ground, norms, expectations and regulations are shifting rapidly towards an assumption of lower oil usage. It’s quite possible that as people start to perceive the upside of this shift, lower usage will follow. As Alcatel-Lucent chairman Ben Verwaayen pointed out at BSR last week – the move to a sustainable economy is going to change our lives more than the Internet. We shouldn’t assume the old expectations will hold.

The lack of any emerging consensus in the peak oil debate is borne out in our public opinion data. When we asked people in 23 countries last year whether the world will 'continually produce more oil' or not, 47% agreed and 42% disagreed. But the public, at least, seems to take a relaxed view of how we might cope with declining oil production - 64% agree that their country can generate enough energy from renewable sources to replace coal, oil - and nuclear - in 20 years.

Whether this is overly optimistic is an issue partially addressed by an interesting new report from the UK Energy Research Council, which looks to have moved the debate forward. Yes, they concede, there may still be large reserves of conventional oil still available. But technical limitations mean they are unlikely to be exploited quickly enough to compensate for the decline in the 'mature' fields - and we may see production peak anyway before 2020. The push for renewables and greater fuel efficiency in climate change policy will help - but there will also be a 'strong incentive' to exploit high carbon non-conventional fuels such as liquefied coal, with potentially disastrous environmental consequences. And they warn that the ongoing volatility of oil prices - which spiked again this week amid economic uncertainty - remains a major disincentive to investment in the sort of alternative energy strategies that the public confidently seem to expect.

Looks like the peak oil debate has a while to run yet.

Free Market Blues, 20 Years On

Some news, in case you missed it (unlikely, given the current wave of anniversary fever): the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, triggering the collapse of communist governments across Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and prompting American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama to announce the ‘end of history’. Liberal democracy – and economic liberalism – had triumphed everywhere and ‘mankind’s ideological evolution’ was at an end.

What with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and 9/11, Fukuyama’s verdict on liberal democracy has been looking rather premature for a while now. But when it came to the economics, to capitalism and the free market – surely Fukuyama had it right there, didn’t he? It’s a question we’ve been exploring in our latest global polling for BBC World Service.

The popular verdict on capitalism, it turns out, is pretty lukewarm. Across the 27 countries we polled, we found little unalloyed enthusiasm for the free market system – an average of just 11% said they thought it worked well and did not need further regulation. A bare majority felt that capitalism had problems that could be addressed by regulation or reform (51%). And nearly a quarter (23%) – felt that capitalism was ‘fatally flawed’.

At the same time, the numbers telling us they see free enterprise as the best system on which to base the future of the world have been drifting down. 54% feel that way now, compared to 63% when we started tracking in 2002.Trust in global companies, meanwhile, continues to decline.

In view of these misgivings, then, why is it that the fall of the big banks last year doesn’t really look likely to rival the Berlin Wall collapse in terms of its long term impact on our economic beliefs? Maybe it’s because there still isn’t really an established alternative model to free market capitalism – Hugo Chavez notwithstanding - for public opinion to rally around. And our increased scepticism of political leaders means that such a new system might find it hard to establish itself. But if Fukuyama was right, and capitalism has won, it looks these days rather like a victory by default.

Consumer Confidence - Has Asia's Economic Sprint Resumed?

There has been much talk of the economic upheaval of the last year as a ‘global’ crisis. And with emergency meetings of the G20 called to address a critical loss of confidence in the banking sector as well as global capital flows still a fraction of what they were, that has seemed like a fair assessment. But perhaps we need to reconsider that ‘global’ tag.

In much of Asia, the recession is looking more and more like a short pause for breath in an economic sprint that’s still ongoing. China’s Statistics Bureau announced at the end of last week that the country’s GDP in the third quarter of 2009 was 8.9% up on the same period last year. Indonesia’s economy is expected to grow at 4% this year – not at all shabby. Compare this to economies in North America and Europe, where if things look a little less bleak than they once did, the return to economic growth is slow and shaky, and a lapse back into recession well within the bounds of possibility. And in some major economies - notably here in the UK, where figures last week showed the economy continuing to contract in the third quarter, it’s far from clear that the recovery has got going at all.

This picture is amply borne out by our International Consumer Sentiment Index - the first in what we hope will be an annual study of consumer confidence across the world. We’ve taken the same approach that academics at the University of Michigan have adopted in monitoring US consumer confidence for more than fifty years, asking people across 22 countries to assess how their finances compare to this time last year, how they expect them to change in the next year, what they think will happen to their country’s economy over the next year and the next five years, and whether they think now is a good time to make major household purchases.

Chinese consumers emerge as the most confident by a long way, with an index score of 113.5, with Indonesians second, recording a score of 100.6. Americans were at only 71.9, and the terminally gloomy Japanese at only 45.1. To put it in some historical context, the highest level of US consumer confidence recorded over recent years was at the height of the dotcom bubble in February 2000, when 111.3 was recorded, while the lowest was in May 1980 as the energy crisis and impending recession started to bite. With two-thirds of Chinese expecting to be richer in a year’s time, perhaps it’s no surprise their economy is booming again – as we know, confidence is central to any economic recovery. And maybe the much-anticipated changing of the economic guard, with the US giving way to China as the motor of growth, is starting to happen sooner than we thought?

Strong Copenhagen Agreement Unlikely, Despite Potential Benefits: Sustainability Experts Speak

The latest findings from our regular poll of sustainability experts around the world from the worlds of business, academia and NGOs illustrates the ambivalence that many of those in the know are feeling as the Copenhagen summit approaches.

On the one hand, they are exceptionally downbeat about the prospects for a meaningful agreement being concluded at Copenhagen - that is, one stringent enough to avert the major and frightening consequences for the climate that most scientists now predict. More than eight out of ten anticipate that, while a total failure to reach agreement is unlikely, the compromise that emerges won't be tough enough to make much of a difference.

But on the other, they see real prospects for a wave of innovation and investment in renewable energy, and low carbon products and services if a really radical agreement is reached. This is important, as it seems to suggest that experts largely don't subscribe to the view that the dynamic between the environment and the economy is a zero-sum game - that is to say, the more you try and fix one, the more you damage the other. With Hu Jintao committing China last week to producing 15% of its power from renewables and nuclear energy by 2020, this is clearly the way the tide is shifting.

Whether it will shift fast enough to avoid us all being engulfed, in the absence of a more ambitious agreement in Denmark in December than currently looks likely, is quite another matter.

Amid The Confusion, A Growing Carbon Consensus

Interpreting public attitudes on climate change is a confusing business these days - apparent contradictions abound, and the contrast between what people appear to believe, and how they behave, is often stark.

Polls like The Guardian's latest illustrate this well. The prevailing attitude of the UK public might be summed up as: yes, climate change is a major threat, yes, I should be doing more about it than I am, but whatever I do it probably won't make any difference - and anyway I'm not prepared to contemplate anything that will cause me financial pain. It's hardly surprising if policymakers seem paralysed by the political consequences of taking major steps to address the problem.

But look a little harder, and a consensus does start to emerge. Our latest global polling on the issue is evidence of this. We interviewed a sample of 1,000 adults in each of 19 countries how they felt about government actions to address climate change, including investment in renewables. Would they be good for the economy, or hurt the economy? Nearly two thirds (62%) felt they would be good for the economy. But what if that isn't the case - what if the economy suffers as a result of a government push to address climate change? Another clear response - three in five (60%) say governments should do it anyway. Of course, the devil is still in the detail. What if the economic damage translates into major cuts in public services, or tax hikes for large swathes of the population as well as much higher energy costs? The public may not have fully come to terms with that.

But even so, the figures are striking. Look at the USA and China - over half (52%) of Americans say they support measures to address climate change that would hurt the economy, and in China, nearly nine in ten (89%) feel that way. There may be a long way to go politically, but surely this amounts to a mandate for boldness from the leaders of the planet's current and future CO2-emitters in chief.

A Boost for Big Government

It’s a year today since Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and we’ve been busy over the summer gauging the effect of a year of market crunch - and government splurge - on global public opinion.

As billions of dollars of state spending has poured into national economies over the last year in a frantic attempt to shore up the financial system and stop recession turning into depression, it’s become increasingly apparent that reports of the death of government as a serious economic player - a fashionable idea in early 2007 - were, as they say, somewhat exaggerated. Big government is back.

The seeds of the financial meltdown were, no doubt, sown over many years. But it’s worth remembering that the situation deteriorated so rapidly last autumn that governments in the major economies by and large didn’t have the time to consult their electorates about the handbrake turn in macro-economic policy that they undertook at the end of last year. The rediscovery of big government has largely done so without the endorsement of voters.

So, what’s the belated verdict? Positive, it appears. Our latest global poll for BBC World Service shows that, by and large, citizens around the world approve of governments attempting to stimulate their national economy in response to the recession - majorities in 13 of the 20 countries we polled supported a significant increase in government spending. Fully two-thirds want to see an increase in government stimulation and oversight of their economy - including nearly half of Americans, who are usually among the most suspicious of government overreach. Supporting troubled industries is also popular; bailing out banks less so. And the unprecedented stimulus package at the heart of the US response seems to have won plaudits, with 46% approving of the US’s approach so far.

But what is also apparent is that while people seem to feel the stimulus was needed in response to the crisis, it won’t in itself be enough in the longer term. One of the most striking findings is the very strong support for government investments in renewable energy and green technology, backed by nearly three-quarters. People seem to be looking for a different model. And they continue to feel that the benefits and burdens of the boom years haven’t been shared fairly. The crisis may have passed, but this appears to be a reminder that big governments need to lead, as well as spend.

New Global Water Certification Program Responds to Water Worries

Water sustainability is a major emerging issue and one that affects a huge number of people. Climate change is expected to lead to increased drought, while a growing (and in some parts of the world increasingly prosperous) population puts increasing pressure on scarce water resources. The BBC notes that the malnourishment of more than 800 million people is associated with a lack of water to grow their food, while water-borne diseases affect more than half of people currently occupying the world’s hospital beds. Safe, clean drinking water is a luxury that more than one billion people have to do without.

The World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden, is an annual meeting where experts, practitioners, leaders, and decision-makers get together to focus on the world’s most urgent water-related issues. Held August 16-22, this year’s meeting brings together perspectives of scientific, business, policy and civic sectors from around the world to explore the theme of access to water in the face of uncertain availability coupled with growing demand.

One solution to the problem of unsustainable water use, put forward at the summit by a group of leading business, social development and conservation organizations, is the development of a new voluntary global water certification program. The Alliance for Water Stewardship has been created to develop best-practice standards for managing water responsibly and to recognize responsible corporations, farming operations, cities, and other water users through certification, similar to the certification of sustainably harvested wood by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Certified companies and other water users would need to meet standards on environmentally sustainable as well as socially beneficial water use.

We've been finding for a while that people around the world are becoming increasingly worried about water- and are indeed more concerned about it than about other high-profile environmental problems like climate change or species depletion. So surely companies that take the issue of sustainable water use seriously deserve to be recognized? A recognized system of certification would make it easier for consumers to make ethical choices, and would benefit companies that recognize just how precious this finite resource really is.

A Healthy Debate?

It's been clear for a while now that US President Barack Obama isn't going to have it all his own way. In particular, his attempts to reform the United States' healthcare system appear to be in intensive care, with his latest compromise proposals achieving the unenviable feat of irritating liberals while leaving his conservative critics unmoved.

While much of the concern centres around the potentially astronomical costs of extending coverage to the millions of Americans currently without health insurance, anything that smacks of 'socialising' the healthcare system seems guaranteed to raise the ire of a significant section of the American general public.

It's a reminder of how different the US mindset is in many respects from the rest of the developed world, whether we're talking about the role of religion in public life, its attitude towards climate change, or taxation. The furore caused in the UK last week by the American right's demonisation of the UK's publicly-funded health service illustrated that - bar the occasional heretic like MEP Daniel Hannan - Europeans are much more comfortable with the state playing a high-profile and overtly redistributive role in their lives. They may whinge about it, but belief in the NHS is a lot more fervent than belief in God in Britain these days.

But if Americans aren't sold on 'socialised medicine', they clearly perceive the need for reform of some kind. Every couple of years, GlobeScan asks the general public in over 20 countries to name the most important issue facing their nation. Our latest data, just out of field, shows that Americans are by some distance the most likely of any country surveyed to mention health care costs - in fact, it's the second most mentioned issue. So maybe Obama is right to persist.

What's the top issue preoccupying Americans then, you ask? With apologies to Bill Clinton, it's the economy, stupid. As it is everywhere else. Maybe Americans aren't so different from the rest of the world after all.

Food Prices - The Silent Financial Crisis?

Interesting to see that Barack Obama has managed to persuade G8 leaders to contribute US$12 billion over the next three years to a food security initiative, according to the New York Times. The Times reports that it'll provide 'emergency anti-hunger aid to poor countries and also help build sustainable, productive agriculture and food delivery systems'.

This seems like a wise move, after the price of staples such as corn, rice and wheat rocketed in mid-2008, causing food riots in developing countries including Egypt and Haiti. Prices have since fallen back, but the latest report from the economists at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) warned that there was a chance of farmers cutting their plantings in response to a drop in demand caused by the global recession, and of a return to the shortages, high prices and associated social unrest of last year.

The food price spike has been something of a silent financial crisis, affecting as it does the global South much more than developed nations. But our data suggests that across the globe, high food prices have in fact had a much more direct effect on people’s lives than the global financial crisis or the credit shortage. Nearly half (47%) of those in the 24 countries we polled for BBC World Service earlier in the year felt that high food prices had affected them ‘a great deal’, compared to 31% who felt that way about the downturn in the global economy, and just 21% who felt they had been affected a great deal by the shortage of financial credit.

Obama deserves plaudits for continuing to engage on this issue despite the fact that it’s no longer making headlines.