Perhaps Dawn Porter should hold a jumble sale instead?

So 12 lucky projects get to share £7.5 million to create Nature Improvement Areas (NIA).

Unfortunately the other 64 contenders 'leave with nothing' as they say on the best game shows.

If my maths is correct each NIA will receive roughly £625,000. And this is to reverse the devasting decline in quality and loss of habitat that has been left unchecked and under funded for decades. Is this really what Professor Lawton was hoping for when he described the appalling state of our green spaces?

Is it really going to make that much of a difference?

Let's put it onto context.

The government (same government, same bunch of people) has apparently spent £750,000 on Olympic games tickets.

Just a couple of weeks ago we were told that MPs took green spaces so seriously they had decided to rent non-native fig trees for Portcullis House at a cost of £400,0000.

The Leveson Inquiry which doesn't appear to be revealing anything we don't already know cost over £850,000 in its first three months.

And I saw today that the presenter and journalist Dawn Porter raised over £7,000 for charity yesterday by holding a jumble sale yesterday.

As the environmental press has been saying, the NIA funding is 'a boost' but it does seem like the environment is being thrown a few scraps to keep quiet rather than any meaningful investment being made.

The environment - the trees, soil, grass, hedges all those things that Lawton described in his report - is the infrastructure of our world and yet we always under invest. Contrast this with HS2 which the government has already spent £200 million on and is expected to spend £1 billion before works starts.

And I don't suppose there will be too many over paid consultants benefiting from NIA funding just some modestly paid employees of NGOs who will no doubt be supported by an army of volunteers working for nothing more than their expenses.

Which reminds me, I've got an idea for that failed Back-to-Work scheme......

You can't price everything all the time.

My colleagues and I had a meeting last week with some very nice people from a very successful international company.

It was one of those meetings where we quickly got into the nitty gritty and had a proper conversation about a number of issues relating to the environment and sustainability.

One subject we talked about was health and well-being. It is a hot topic at the moment because it seems everyone wants to contribute in some way. But, as we discussed, it's actually quite a complex subject.

We know of organisations that have run health and well-being initiatives, launched them with great fanfare, spent good money on resources but achieved very little. Why? Because the people that partake are normally those that are already pretty healthy. Motivating the overweight or unfit to join a yoga class or go for a swim (even if it is free) is not that easy.

So the subject of our discussion last week was about the business case for health and well-being initiatives. Our new friends wanted to know how they would justify the expenditure? How could they calculate the return? How would they show a cost saving because without one they wouldn't get approval.

We all know that 'research shows'.....less absenteeism, greater productivity, better staff retention etc etc etc. But what were the scientific conditions when these measurements were taken?

Are we to believe that personal trainers working in the thousands of gyms up and down the country have less days off work through illness and are more productive than those of us who cannot claim to be as fit? I wonder.

No, to me the answer is the corporate culture. A health and well-being initiative isn't going to have any impact unless the culture of the organisation supports it. Is the business normally a caring employer? Does the business have support systems in place or just a treadmill? Is there information for employees that would encourage them to be fitter and healthier for their own sake?

Health and well-being, like the environment and sustainability, need to be approached and designed holistically. taking everything into account. If you asked an architect to design a house you would expect them to design something that worked with and fitted into the landscape and if it didn't you would be upset and probably wouldn't use the design.

Any initiative that you launch needs to fit into your landscape, if it doesn't it won't get used and you won't achieve anything.

As for justifying the cost - if you create the right culture and have the initiatives I would expect you to see the results. But can I just ask why do you bother painting the office, or putting carpet down, or providing soft chairs.......?

Live life for tomorrow

When I was growing up in the 1970s I loved visiting my grandparents house, which always seemed huge compared to our own and full of curiosities, which I now know to just have been an accumulation of junk.

However, one room always intrigued me: Grandad's 'secret room'. This room always had the door closed and the curtain was always drawn. Inside the air was filled with a sweet and musty aroma and there was a gentle hum of electric motors. This was of course nothing sinister it was simply a spare room converted into a larder. Fridges and freezers had been installed, cupboards overflowed with tins and packets and bubbling away on an old side-board was the latest attempt at nettle or plum wine.

This was a room 'just in case'. And my grandparents weren't alone in being prepared for tomorrow, they were part of a generation of people that saved 'for a rainy day' and never threw anything away because 'it might come in handy one day'.

My grandparents were also the people that bought me my first pair of binoculars, my membership to the YOC and introduced me to their relatives in Sussex who worked on farms and were able to show me a completely different view of the world.

They had different values from my parents. Money wasn't a barrier to having a day out when all you needed was a flask, a packet of biscuits and river to walk along. They were a generation that lived life by the seasons of the year and always looked forward to the next.

My grandparents weren't business people, weren't educated at university and weren't very well read but to me they were more visionary than most people who have studied how to write a vision statement.

"Live life for today" is the motto of the 21st century. But what about tomorrow? Is it right that we should live our lives by such a selfish philosophy?

We are actually pretty good at surviving and all the evidence suggests we will continue to live longer, so maybe we should start thinking about our tomorrow and the tomorrow of others.

Maybe we should all start our own larder.

The NHS Sustainable Development Conference

February 14th was the date for the third annual NHS Sustainable Development conference: Delivering the Sustainable Healthcare System.

Crex was there to discuss how the NHS can engage with employees and other stakeholders to shift mindset, change behaviour and achieve their goals collectively and more quickly.

The key messages were very mixed: on the one hand we were told that a poll of NHS Chief Executives felt that engaging with staff on issues of sustainability was easy. On the other hand the audience (people with sustainability in their job title) felt that they lacked senior management support, which of course is crucial.

The problem might be interpretation. For many at the conference sustainability meant 'energy' and reducing carbon. Far less people talked about environmental sustainability and embedding this into organisational culture.

Interestingly the greatest gains across the NHS has been in reducing carbon emissions from energy. Much less has been done about procurement, which involves many more people and is essentially about making the right the decision, not just installing a new boiler.

So the quick wins are being achieved, the hard work is still ahead of them.

Your responsibility as a communicator

Sustainable living and re-building green spaces to allow our wildlife to flourish ought to be an exciting proposition, one that provokes enthusiasm and passion, so you can imagine how disappointed I was to sit through four presentations on the theme of sustainability, climate change, and energy reduction and witness the growing boredom of the audience around me.

It is hard enough to motivate people, simplify the science and make it all relevant without being boring, incoherent and inconsistent.

A plea to anyone who is speaking to an audience on these subjects:

Only present on a subject you are passionate about. Audiences sense when you don't really mean it.

Tell a story. Have a beginning, middle and end. A stream of thoughts in random order doesn't work, no matter how good the quality of the material itself.

If you use slides make them interesting. Use pictures rather than text and don't ever put anything on the screen that can't be read. Saying 'you don't need to read this' is a waste of a slide and begs the question 'why put it up there?'

Spellcheck your slides - get someone else to spellcheck for you.

Format your slides - different fonts, sizes and colours do not make bullet points more interesting, just annoying.

If there is more than one person presenting and you are supposed to be talking about a theme then check what they are saying. Yesterday I watched as one person completely undermined the following presentation by dismissing the subject of her talk within his.

Try and do more than just present data. Set challenges, tasks, talk about consequences, opportunities and create a vision of what can be.

Finally, if you're not very confident at speaking then get some coaching, it really can help.

Many people are still getting to grips with the concept of sustainable living and working. Many don't understand biodiversity at all. Climate change, greenhouse gases and carbon emissions can seem too complicated to even bother trying to understand. So if you are asked to present then you have a responsibility to do a good job and get it right for all the other people like you who are trying to make a difference.

It isn't easy but an audience will make a link between you, your presentation style and the subject matter.

So just be great at it, you know you can be.