Am I stoic or a systems thinker: Why I have high hopes for 2020.
Somewhere deep inside the pit of my stomach, some embers are kindling for climate action that has been cold and still for a while now. It feels like hope. Why?
Well, if political progress is anything to go by, we are dangerously treading our own ever-rising water levels. Some twenty-seven years after the 1st COP in Berlin, while 197 countries signed a non-legally binding agreement to keep our atmosphere within a 2-degree temperature rise in Paris, the science clearly states we need to stay within 1.5 degrees. While countries have submitted their first round of carbon reduction pledges (via a submission called an NDC), when totalled, we can, at best, expect nearer a 2.9–3.2 degrees rise. While the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has just reported we are now on track for a rise between 3–5 degrees by the end of the century, the majority of our respective nations are already failing to deliver on their Pre-2020 targets. And as we all know, hopes of COP25 finalising the rules of the game, so we can focus on the critically needed accountability and increased ambition, slipped through our fingers in what has widely been considered the worst climate negotiations in a quarter of a century of its existence.
Anyone in those negotiating halls would call me delirious.
However. The end of 2019 feels like a moment in climate history. Something akin to what Joanna Macy called “The Great Turning” in her book, Active Hope, over a decade ago. Like a tanker turning in the ocean, we’ve been attempting to spin the ship’s wheel for a while now, but only now does it feel like we are beginning to feel the bow break the tide and carve a new path.
So what, exactly, has changed?
For an excellent summary of the some of the specifics, check out Mafalda Duarte’s summary, here, or Impact Alfa’s finance specific highlights, here. Both offer many reassuring references, that we are on the right track.
For now, though, I’m going to focus on the systems-level view, and for this, I want to talk regime change.
(Geels 2002)
In this oldie but a goodie diagram above, niche innovations exist outside of the mainstream. These innovations, over time, can get supported by a small network of key actors with a vision for the future. Here they talk of ‘elements becoming aligned’ and ‘being stabilised into a dominant design’ so that they can pass through the barriers of market adoption, technical knowledge, and policy in order to shape a new regime and influence the broader landscape.
All very true. For me, though, systems always boil down people. And it is two types of people I see in this regime shift that gives me hope today:
1. Child protestors: Generating new windows of opportunity:
The social movement for action on climate that we have seen erupt across the world in the last 18 months, is not record-breaking. Those of you that know modern history would painfully remember that the Tiananemen Square, the Anti-Iraq war and People’s March for the second referendum on Brexit all garnered much larger crowds and didn’t achieve the goals it set out to.
However, the archetypal protestor today is different. While we have the full cross-section of people attending the climate protests across the world, one thing stands out amongst the crowd: The angry eyes of a child.
This is truly the age of Gen Z. With Millennials already becoming world leaders and running the worlds largest companies, when this even younger army of social media savvy, digitally native, environmentally and socially aware children are marching the streets, it is perhaps only Boris among us who can turn a blind eye to the innocent eyes of a child asking why.
The world over, outraged children are sacrificing their education and walking the streets to get their voices heard.
Seeing in natural systems, I struggle to see the difference between this tirade of youth protests and the tidal waves that will rise to many of our doors in the years to come. This first wave, however, carries an impatient and important message of what’s to come, and for this, we should be very grateful.
As a long-time fundraiser, I was acutely aware that to the average family household the cause of climate change was intangible, so the bulk of the funding would go to other worthwhile causes like children, pets, and cancer. Not only because they were worthy, but because invariably we were moved to support these causes and they were directly personal to us.
What this army of child protestors has done for us, is bring climate change to the doorsteps of families not yet ready to listen and made it personal. It’s at the breakfast table. It’s in the art they bring home from school. It’s the fear when they go to bed. It’s the awkward questions we that as adults can’t find an answer to.
The impact of this is not to be underestimated and is perhaps best illustrated in the city I currently live. In 2007–8, less than half the population thought climate change was induced by human activity. By 2015, 41% of population thought it was a ‘serious issue’. Today, 71% of the UK population understand we are in a climate emergency and the problem is man-made. The result? Among others, our government has enshrined the need for the UK to reach Net Zero by 2050 into law.
So, in the cold light of day, what have and will these fresh faces achieve apart from knee jerk political reactions and ample press lines. In global negotiations? Not much. But then if COP25 is anything to go by, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
What they have done, so beautifully, instead, is open up a new ‘window of opportunity’ as seen with Geels above for novelties to emerge and coalesce. But niche innovations without adoption in markets, policy and technical knowledge will, at best, remain niche, or at worst, become a tragic waste of resources, when all this world needs right now is focus.
If anyone has seen the Greta/ Attenborough Skype introduction, they’d empathise. This window of opportunity has a time limit, so our intelligent responses to these opportunities are critical.
2. Climate engineers: Mainstreaming niche innovations
Such insight leaves me torn. While I tip my hat to the great feats Extinction Rebellion in the UK and Greta Thunberg are achieving globally, what keeps me up at night is that without a systems-level view and deep integration, all this spent effort will become a Wikipedia page for generations to lament over in years to come.
Which is why I care so much about the perhaps a little lesser-known group of activists that see these windows of opportunities and work with forensic precision behind the scenes to maximise their impact. I think of these lesser-known climate activists as “the engineers”. Observing the landscape of ‘niche innovations, identifying key points of leverage and becoming an expert in knowing how to realise them. To me, these people engineer trends into the mainstream and we must support them.
Here, I tip my hat to just one of my favourites in the UK.
The Legal Engineer:
James Thornton was voted by the New Statesman as one of 10 people who could change the world. Founder and CEO of Client Earth, over the last 11 years, quietly and diligently, he has brought forth an army of climate change litigators to fight very specific battles, setting forensically precise precedents that many legal professionals will seek to leverage in these all-important decades to come.
Ten years ago in the barren landscape of public legal action on climate, their first move was to bring three cases against Germany, the UK, and the EU to ensure access to the courts for people bringing public-interest cases. It took almost ten years, but in 2017, the UN condemned the European Union for continuing to block access to justice and demanded that it let people go to court to protect the environment. But, why is this important? Because it paves the way for things like this:
In 2018, the Hague Court of Appeal saw an environmental group and over 900 citizens succeed in their rights-based claim against the Dutch government for inaction against climate change [Urgenda Foundation v the Kingdom of Netherlands, 2018]. While this is now under appeal, the verdict at the time stated that the government has a duty under the European Convention on Human Rights to protect its citizens against the threat of climate change, and as such, the government must now reduce carbon dioxide emissions by a minimum of 25 percent compared to 1990 levels. This was the first decision by any court in the world ordering a state to limit its greenhouse gas emissions for a reason other than statutory mandates.
Still not impressed? Well, imagine this cited in future cases in support of the future inaction of countries around the world in the delivery of their carbon emission reductions in line with the Paris Climate Agreement commitments and its 1.5-degree revision[1].
Precedents from legal action are developing into a dominant design and making its way towards the mainstream. Watch your back, future climate criminals. We’re coming for you ;)
Positive Feedback loops — Empowering Climate Engineers
There are of-course engineers everywhere, working within their specific expertise, observing the landscape of niche innovations, tirelessly aligning and stabilising them into new dominant designs ready to influence the existing landscape. Enough of these and we break the mould: The new regime influences or overrules the existing landscape.
Many of our engineers, mainly due to low resources, continue to operate in siloes. But, gratefully, our world doesn’t operate in a closed system, so nature’s positive feedback loops can take hold.
In Finance, we have Mark Carney, soon to become a Special Envoy for Climate Action for the UN. In his position at the Bank of England he co-launched the Task Force for Climate Disclosure, the all-important standardisation of the pricing and reporting of climate-related financial risks. Such progress builds on decades of Climate-related risk and opportunity disclosure from leaders like Paul Dickinson at CDP and Mardi McBrien at CDSB.
In investment, powered by this flow of transparency and ever-growing consensus on reporting, we have Stephanie Pfeiffer, CEO of the Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change, the Europe arm of the CA100+movement, representing 170 members across 13 countries and amounting to $23 trillion in assets. Thanks to ever-increasing transparency, CA100+ achieved turn arounds in Corporate environmental policy, like 2019 Royal Dutch Shell’s announcement of its first-ever, short term carbon emissions reduction target.
Thanks to the growing awareness from corporations of their climate risks and opportunities, Nick Molho, Executive Director of the Aldersgate Group, was able to aggregate enough big business influence in early 2019 with a signed letter from 130+ CEOs, advocating for the policy reform required to enable a Net Zero by 2050 transition. Since achieved.
Even some of the greatest sustainability-focused CEO’s have expressed frustrations at their boards not being as cognisant of the urgency of Climate Action as they are, for this we have, Julie Baddeley of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, who has teamed up with the World Economic Forum to create Chapter Zero, a climate change engagement centre for corporate boards.
In International Climate Finance, we have Kate Hughes, Director of International Climate & Energy at BEIS, and her team who manage a £5.8b international Climate Finance Fund and who were busily helping Mafalda Duarte’s supra-national Climate Investment Funds ten years ago. A fund that has since developed one of the largest concentrated solar farms in the world in Ouarzazate, Morocco and has dedicated private sector set-asides to start bridging that, oftentimes, cavernous gap between concessional and commercial capital.
Behind many of these, we have awesome women like Sonia Medina, Climate Change Director for the Childrens’ Investment Fund Foundation who keeps spotting these engineers and adding them to her portfolio and taking the risk on their unique contributions when many others wouldn’t. This is a woman I can safely say is managing one the smartest systems change enabling portfolio’s I’ve seen.
Tipping Points
There are many more I won’t mention, and indeed many, many more both here and globally I don’t know, who are maximising the impact of these windows of opportunity and collectively inching us towards a tipping point.
Now, without sounding like too much of a geek, I love tipping points. Let’s look at the basics: All you need to do is shift the centre of gravity to it’s given tipping point, and let nature do the hard work for you. What’s not to like?
In this wonderfully overly simplified example that is our life, the centre of gravity is amassing interventions on climate change - and in the words of the late, great, Victor Hugo, “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come”.
Onwards to The Exponential Decade.
Kate | kate@wolfenden.info
NB. I’m tempted to map this system in 2020 and contribute to helping us focus on the movements and moments that really matter. If you know of any engineers that you think are moving the dial, please do reach out. I’d love to hear about them.
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[1] If legal levers interest you further, check out The Climate Case Chart. I follow it FAR too much to be considered healthy. It tracks all live lawsuits associated with climate change globally. As of May 2019, there were 275 cases against governments, and 25 cases against corporations and individuals globally, plus a further 652 federal statutory claims and 61 constitutional claims in the US — more than 1,000 live cases in total.