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In this blog, the BBC's GLOBAL MINDS invites Robert Lamb - producer and inventor of BBC World News’ World Challenge series - to gather his thoughts as we embark on the sixth year of broadcasting the series on the Channel. ‘Make a buck or two and feel good about it' is how he sums up the series which invites viewers to nominate small and medium scale businesses that benefit the community and environment. More years ago than I care to admit, I started my journalistic career in the BBC newsrooms. Then, as now, the buzz for news journalists is the macho big story landing on your desk…. ‘big’ politics, ‘big’ disasters, ‘big’ crime and violence, ‘big’ corporate profits...that got the adrenalin coursing. I wouldn’t have believed it, if I had been told that decades-on, my main journalistic output would be devoted to small – ‘small’ enterprise, ‘small’ impact on the environment, ‘small’ profits…. Yet, in essence, that is what World Challenge is: it is a viewer-led series shining a light on a handful of the many tens of thousands of people who are doing sustainable development, albeit on a modest scale. These ‘entrepreneurs’ are next to impossible to categorise. They vary from astute businessmen to NGO activists. They have one thing in common – they have not waited for aid agencies or ‘experts’ to come along and tell them the ‘what’ and the ‘how’: they are just getting on with the job of building a sustainable business and/or community initiative. Curiously, the World Challenge team finds winning an audience for the ‘small’ and undramatic far more exciting - and far more challenging - than coverage of the "big" news stories.
WORLD CHALLENGE – THE REASON WHY 99.9% of humanity goes about their everyday business peacefully. Yet, for quite a number of us, the lifestyle we lead is highly destructive. We just don’t know it. For instance, our insatiable demand for products, often wrapped in indestructible plastic, such as palm oil (used for cosmetics and as an ingredient in numerous groceries) or beef or soya bean is helping to lay waste to the tropical forests. (Those forests are ‘sinks’ for CO2 and their burning – an area the size of Greece every year in flames - contributes as much greenhouse gas to the atmosphere as global transport). At the other end of the economic telescope the 1.5 billion truly poor – unintentionally – do just as much destruction. They slash-and-burn the forest to get a meagre harvest. And what happens when renewable resources such as tropical forest are all but exhausted? You get boat people (Haiti & West Africa); you get inter-communal and ethnic conflict (Darfur & village water disputes in India); you get unnecessary deaths in landslides from bare hillsides and even tsunamis (the mortality in the Asian tsunami was far less in areas where the mangrove had not been razed). But rarely do news reporters have the air-time to make the connections between environmental despoliation and the social consequences. The rate at which we humans – rich and dirt poor - are destroying so-called "ecosystem services" (clean water, stable climate, soil, fisheries, hardwoods, watersheds, biodiversity, medicinal plants, natural pest predators, pollinators... etc) is actually the "biggest" of all contemporary stories. For example, a new UN report costs the destruction of those myriad services at over US$4 trillion a year. That dwarfs even the losses and subsidies injected into the world economy during the recent recession. Imagine if the media devoted as much attention to this sub-prime green attrition as to the rescue of the Banks and financial infrastructure? It is so rarely reported because it happens incrementally. It's only when a scientific report is published and tells us that vast areas of inland seas are now oxygen-less dead zones; or an area the size of Texas in the Pacific a plastic whirlpool; or 75% of all plant species and the third of all amphibians are threatened with extinction do we hear about it as a footnote in the News. More often than not, the "environmental" story goes out with no economic or social analysis of the repercussions. And who can blame newsrooms and the documentary makers for not making the links? There is only so much bad news we can take (programme ratings tell us that). And so many of these stories seem so far removed from our everyday lives. In essence, World Challenge was born out of a way to tell a different story about sustainable development. We didn’t want to do stories about those aid agency ‘showcase’ projects or green PR initiatives, we wanted authentic stories which check out down the line.
THE WORLD CHALLENGE EXPERIMENT – ‘JUST DO IT’ We dipped our toe in the water six years ago by asking BBC viewers to send in those authentic & verifiable cases of sustainable enterprise; schemes that were making a profit but also benefiting the community without overtaxing the environment. It was sort of an act of blind faith that positive things were being done without fuss at the grassroots. We had done no audience evaluations. We were imbued with the ‘just do it’ approach. The viewers responded magnificently. We are now getting around 1000 nominations every year. And we have been amazed by the diversity. They have ranged from: a paper maker in Sri Lanka turning elephant dung into high-quality greeting cards; an Ethiopian village transforming life by installing a river turbine power generator; a Kenyan commercial venture breeding natural insect predators to control pests; an organisation in Nepal making prosthetic limbs out of recycled tin cans; a roof tile maker in the Ukraine manufacturing his tiles from waste plastic; a Pakistani womens’ collective marketing high value honey... World Challenge started as a ‘bottom-up’ venture – the viewer nominators are our ‘researchers’. It would have been nigh on impossible for us programme makers in London to have found such fascinating examples of communities and entrepreneurs getting on with making environmentally-friendly development work for them. The significance of the series is that it is small and medium businesses that have the lion's share of the world economy, not the big corporations, as many of us may think. By shining a light on them we seek to show that using resources wisely is, purely and simply, good business. Such a shame that almost no government -- despite 40 odd years of recognising the contribution of ecological processes to the global economy -- bothers to assess wealth in terms of renewable resources safeguarded, and even rejuvenated (odd when you think that ‘ecology’ & ‘economics have a root in the same ancient Greek meaning).
Costa Rica, is an exception. It has a state-sponsored system of ‘payment for environmental services’. And guess what? Its more or less halted deforestation and is an island of prosperity relative to its environmentally-devastated neighbours such as Nicaragua or El Salvador. But nearly everywhere else nature’s services are "off the books"; what economists refer to as 'an externality' (an oil spill requiring manufacture and application of detergents, capital machinery etc. is actually good in terms of GNP? The annihilation of fisheries and suffocation of marine ecosystems following a major oil spill, is not counted). It's a kind of madness. And yet we are all swept up in it -- you only need to tune to the endless hours of finance & business coverage on TV to realise how little headway environmental economics has made to our assessments of real wealth (though there are notable exceptions). Turning a mangrove into a polluting prawn farm or building a parking lot on a green space covered in weeds, counts – keeping them the way they are for their many services to our health & economic wellbeing, doesn’t. (The wild ancestor of maize was found by accident on a patch of wasteland in Mexico City – an unquantifiable benefactor of food security). World Challenge is the antidote to crash-and-burn capitalism. I suppose this is what makes World Challenge more or less unique in the international broadcasting firmament. It's not proselytising for 'greenery' as a path out of poverty and as a path to a more lasting kind of development, it is simple reportage each year on a dozen samples of, well, good sense. Our viewers’ nominations put the eco back into economics.
UPS MORE THAN DOWNS That’s not to say its all been plain-sailing for us as producers or for the finalists we have filmed. One project manager complained bitterly that the coverage had not lead to any donations from the viewers; another complained that the exposure on the BBC had not dented the corrupt environment he was forced to operate in. Never to be forgotten was an outfit in Central America that had made a solar powered ‘oven’ to sterilise toxic hospital waste – when, exercising due diligence, we got there we found they’d made only one and it had blown away in a hurricane. Last year – the 5th anniversary of World Challenge – we decided to go back to some of the finalists to find out how they had fared over the years. It was a huge encouragement to us to discover that all but one was still in business. Most told us that while winning one of the cash prizes would have been nice, the real value of World Challenge to them was the publicity and local prestige of appearing on BBC World News and in Newsweek. Some reported a leap in orders from home and abroad. To us as producers, one of the best things about World Challenge is to get the 5 star ratings on Global Minds and to get such an amazing reaction from BBC viewers and Internet users. ‘Make a buck or two and feel good about it' is pretty much what I think World Challenge is all about. So if you are a 'Global Minds' logger-on, go and log on to www.theworldchallenge.co.uk and nominate a business or an entrepreneur or a community who is making a green profit. And if you have a critique to make of the output and how we can improve, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on Global Minds.