Net Zero: The Sunlit Upland

As our politicians belatedly prepare road maps out of lockdown it is critical their plans look beyond short hop journeys to a new normal and train eyes on the horizon to what must be our final destination: net zero.

We start the journey from an unrecognisable landscape. The business as usual terrain which we live on is broken and scarred from the violent economic tremors of the Coronavirus quake. High above the fractured infrastructure of modern life, the citadel of capitalism constructed by big business has also been shaken by the shockwaves of a global pandemic. Those living inside have let down the drawbridge for unconditional bailouts to rebuild the weakened walls and tilted towers of their business empires.

But we must not be cowed into compliance by their economic power. As we survey our broken lands we must resist the urge to stay put and rebuild what was there before. Instead, we must find the collective will to leave behind Business as Usual, journey beyond New Normal and set up home in a new place called Net Zero.

The journey ahead is long and challenging. Obstacles will be put in our way by Big Business as it uses all the means at its disposal to maintain the bottom line, setbacks will be encountered as, inevitably, some ideas and approaches don’t work as hoped and personal sacrifices will need to be made as we change how we consume, how we work and how we travel.

But with vision, imagination and ingenuity we can navigate a route through the hazards and move forward to the broad sunlit uplands of Net Zero.

We can inhabit a place where people and planet are prioritised over profit, where we live above the lower limits of human need and below the upper limits of planetary health, where success is measured by well being of people and the planet.

We can inhabit a place where businesses rooted in community thrive, where social enterprises, mutuals and co-operatives are supported to succeed, where a circular economy powered by a green new deal makes the most efficient use of finite natural resources.

We can inhabit a place where the air we breath is clean, where the spaces we live in are green and nature is allowed to flourish, where net emissions are zero and potentially catastrophic rises in global temperatures are limited to 1.5c.

But only if we look to the horizon and start now on the journey which will take us from broken terrain to sunlit upland.

Airlines fight for their flights

Do Not Resuscitate.

The airline industry is in a critical condition in intensive care. Richard Branson has offered a private island as collateral on a government bailout to keep his Virgin Atlantic airline from nosediving into administration and Easyjet have already accepted a £600m taxpayer handout to keep it from crashing whilst its planes are grounded. Meanwhile, in the industry’s fight for life, executives of the other big industry players have warned of massive job losses in a co-ordinated counter attack to pressurise governments to return the industry to business as usual as quickly as possible.

For the sake of future generations government must not yield. They must resist a return to a business as usual model in which the perpetual growth in air traffic is regarded as a sign of success for a thriving trading nation. Instead, the airline industry must be reborn in a way that avoids shortfalls in social well-being that could be felt from thousands of people losing their jobs and overshoots in the ecological limits of our planet from the emissions generated by air travel. It must be modelled on The Doughnut.

Coronavirus has ushered in the transformational change to the industry that was urgently needed to protect our planet for future generations. It is unlikely politicians would have found the courage themselves to demand a new outlook on air travel from the industry. It is just as unlikely that we, as consumers, would have have accepted the change needed in our behaviours.

However, Coronavirus has hit the reset button on business as usual.

The need for a green new deal is now glaringly obvious. Governments must act to ensure the rebirth of the airline industry fits within the net zero targets they have set and to create new employment opportunities for the thousands of airline workers that would be affected by transformation to a new paradigm for air travel.

Highly paid industry executives must use wit and imagination to set a new flight path for the industry that looks beyond short term passenger growth targets. This inevitability means grounding the low margin high volume model that stimulated a surge in greenhouse gas emissions from flying over the last two decades.

And we must remember there is an alternative way. Reducing the number of flights we take does not now seem like a big sacrifice to make.

The airline industry will continue its desperate demands to revive their business as usual model. The order should remain in place: Do Not Resuscitate.

We Must All Sign the ‘Big Business as Usual’ DNR

As health systems across the world are overwhelmed by the rapid spread of a deadly virus, the economic system which has left us all vulnerable to the virulent strain of Coronavirus sweeping exponentially across continents is, like many of the people infected by the disease, in intensive care fighting for its life.

However, unlike the thousands of people fighting for breath in overloaded intensive care units, the economic model that has plundered and polluted the planet, stripped back the state, enfeebled public services, and neglected community is not worthy of heroic efforts to preserve life.

There can not, must not be a return to ‘business as usual’ and the pursuit of short term profits and perpetuals prioritised in the shareholder economy.

Instead we must regenerate. We must find a new way to be. We must find a new way of living that “recognises that well-being depends on enabling every person to lead a life of dignity and opportunity, while safeguarding the integrity of Earth’s life-supporting systems,” as urged by Kate Raworth author of ‘Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21^st Century Economist”.

The titular Doughnut, Raworth’s new economic model of human well-being, is increasingly recognised as an important tool for guiding humanity through the 21st Century. Raworth’s Doughnut combines two concentric circles to depict the two boundaries – social and ecological – that encompass human well being. The inner boundary is the floor under which twelve internationally agreed dimensions of social well being, including hunger, ill health, illiteracy and energy poverty, must not fall. The outer boundary of the Doughnut is the ecological ceiling through which pressure on Earth’s life supporting systems, such as climate change, ocean acidification and biodiversity loss, must not break.

Raworth asserts: “Between the two boundaries lies the ecologically safe and socially just space in which all of humanity has the opportunity to thrive.”

In essence, we need to be the dough of the Doughnut. Raworth’s dough recipe has four key ingredients:

recognising the dependence of human well-being on planetary health
reducing deep inequalities that reflect social shortfalls and ecological overshoots caused by the current economic model
a renewal of economic thinking and policymaking so that prioritisation of gross domestic product growth is replaced by an economic vision designed to be regenerative and distributive
an understanding of the complex interdependence of human well-being and planetary health

Since Raworth first created her model of well-being in 2012 it has been widely applied in academia, progressive businesses, urban planning and civil society as a tool to think differently about sustainable development. Now Amsterdam is set to become the first city in the world to adopt the Doughnut as a model to guide decision making.

“The doughnut does not bring us the answers but is a way of looking at it so that we don’t keep on going in the same structures we used to,” explained Marieke Van Doorminck, Amsterdam’s Deputy Mayor, citing decisions made to deal with the city’s housing crisis that fill the socially just and ecologically safe space between the inner and outer rings of the Doughnut. Not only will more houses be built to address the issue but the city now also plans to introduce regulations to ensure builders use materials that are recycled and bio based.

The solutions to Amsterdam’s housing problems identified by using the Doughnut to look at things in a new way also encompass a new economic model that is increasingly recognised as an alternative to the throwaway consumer culture spawned from the economic system we have been chained to for the last forty years.

Circularity aims to eliminate waste and reduce pollution and carbon emissions through reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling resources. The circular economy, as this new model is also known, creates a closed-loop system in which “waste” from one product or process becomes “food” for another industrial process or a regenerative resource for nature. Amsterdam’s new housing regulations will use the principle of the circular economy to build houses that inhabit the Doughnut’s safe space.

Transition to a circular economy is also underway in Scotland where the model is recognised as an imperative to achieving Scotland’s net zero emissions target by 2045. Introducing proposed legislation in the Circular Economy Bill, Roseanna Cunningham, Cabinet Secretary for Climate Change and Land Reform, said: “An estimated 80% of our global climate emissions are currently linked to the production, consumption and waste of products and resources. For our journey towards becoming a net-zero society to be successful, it must involve a fundamental re-think about how we use and reuse materials.”

In addition to environmental benefits Ms Cunningham expects a thriving circular economy to present “enormous economic and industrial opportunities” by improving productivity, opening up new markets, providing employment opportunities and lowering the cost of the goods we need.

Whilst Scotland is committed to developing an economic model that lives in the safe ecological space under the outer ring of the Doughnut, another small nation on the other side of the world has committed to a different economic perspective that aims to help all its citizens live in the space above the Doughnut’s socially just inner ring.

Last year, New Zealand became the first country in the world to deliver a ‘Wellbeing Budget’. Spending decisions were informed by a Living Standards Framework (LSF) developed by the New Zealand Treasury to provide a perspective on what matters for New Zealanders’ well-being, now and into the future. Based on the principle that gauging the long-term impact of policies on the quality of people’s lives is better than focusing on short-term output measures, the budget set five priorities: addressing mental health issues, child well-being, supporting indigenous peoples aspirations, encouraging productivity and transitioning to a sustainable economy.

“We’re embedding that notion of making decisions that aren’t just about growth for growth’s sake, but how are our people faring?” Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, said. “How is their overall well-being and their mental health? How is our environment doing? These are the measures that will give us a true measure of our success.”

The questions asked by Ardern are essentially the same as those Raworth asks. And the models being used in New Zealand and Amsterdam to provide a fresh perspective for decision making are similar – the twelve domains used in New Zealand’s LSF map closely to the twelve dimensions which make up the social foundation of Raworth’s Doughnut.

It should then be no surprise the solutions also converge. Building Regulations in Amsterdam, Circular Economy in Scotland and Economic Transformation in New Zealand’s all recognise the need to do things differently, to live in a way that prioritises people and planet ahead of profit and perpetual growth. Together they provide a vision of how we can be in the future, how we can develop a thriving economy that recognises well being and planetary health.

The way we live has brought us to a second global crisis in little over a decade. Last time, following the financial crisis in 2008, banks were bailed out and the stakeholder model revived. Since then ‘big business as usual’ has fought to maximise profit at the expense of the well-being of people and the health of the planet.

Once again it is in a state of collapse, fighting for survival, dependent on the state and underpaid, overworked key workers for life support. This time though the medical order we write must be ‘Do Not Resuscitate’.

Time to draw battle lines

Coronavirus is everywhere – epedemiologically, politically and socially. A quick glance at a coronavirus map shows it has spread to every continent with hotspots of dry coughs in China, Iran and Italy.

In the UK, senior politicians have been conspicuous by their presence and the new Conservative Chancellor used his first budget to raid the Exchequer for additional money to manage the outbreak. Even the lesser spotted Boris Johnson has emerged from hiding to advise the populace how to wash their hand in his accustomed bumbling manner.

Politicians have been given air time and column inches to disseminate the public health message. Coronavirus has saturated media output: live feeds provide rolling outbreak updates, newspaper headlines and broadcast bulletins are dominated by the pandemic with any other news event relegated to the inside pages or cursory mentions “In other news today”, and it is the only topic on the countless topical phone-ins which fill the morning radio schedules.

Despite blanket coverage, attempts to contain the virus are failing. The UK is soon expected to formally move from ‘Phase 1 Containment’ to ‘Phase 2 Delay’ which will include closing schools, cancelling large scale gatherings and encouraging people to work from home.

Whilst the virus is continuing to spread, the messages are hitting home. The social and economic costs of containment and delay seem to be widely accepted as necessary to deal with the outbreak. Mouths are being covered, tissues are being used, hands are being washed and handshakes are being avoided. Our behaviours are changing. Quickly.

The urgency in our national response to the threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak contrasts sharply to the procrastination and prevarication which epitomises our response to the far more serious threat of interrelated climate change and biodiversity loss.

However, it does show if the Establishment is minded to do so that it can galvanise a nation against imminent danger. It shows what can be done and how quickly change can be accepted.

Of course, the fight against coronavirus is taking place on a single front which focuses effort on devising a battle plan and assembling resources for the fight. In contrast, the theatre of war against climate change and biodiversity loss is far larger and more complex.

As such, it demands even more urgent, far-reaching action to avert climate catastrophe and a different mindset from those in positions of influence to lead us through change unprecedented in scale. Political leaders must rise above the adversarial political gaming which has come to characterise our parliamentary democracy. Instead, bridges must be built and hands offered (metaphorically only – the coronavirus precludes actual hand holding) across political divides to invigorate our response to impending ecological collapse. A Climate and Biodiversity (CAB) War Cabinet should be established to form a parliamentary coalition which places action on climate change and biodiversity loss above the politics of the electoral cycle.

The purpose of the coalition would be to foster a collective national effort which would enable the actions and changes in behaviour needed to tackle climate change. The coalition would:

signal a shift in mindset by making a joint political declaration promising a collaborative, collective response to the climate challenge. The declaration would commit political parties to a climate coalition until the net zero target is reached.
set out a vision of a net zero economy and lay out a programme of measures – or a low carbon ‘green print’ – to achieve emissions targets
collectively promote the net zero vision to galvanise a national response to the climate crisis and reinforce the changes in behaviour needed to achieve the net zero target.
expedite political decision making to enable efficient execution of the ‘green-print’ by and nimble responses to new opportunities and threats.
take collective responsibility for climate change action by regularly reviewing and transparently reporting progress towards the net zero target.

A CAB War Cabinet would be faced with a daunting challenge.

Our response to the threat of pandemic provides a model of what a concerted, national endeavour to net zero would look and feel like with visible leadership from politicians flanked by experts, facts easily available through trusted sources, increased awareness of the impact of our behaviours and acceptance of our obligation to change.

However, the blitz launched against the threat of coronavirus is unsustainable for the much longer, more strategic campaign needed to combat climate change and biodiversity loss. Forces for transformational economic and societal change must be lined up for a sustained push on all key fronts to gain supremacy over defenders of ‘business as usual’. Important strategic strongholds must be established in the battle grounds of energy, travel and agriculture. But breaking through the seemingly impregnable fortifications of big business and overcoming the propaganda of consumerism will be arduous as opposing forces dig-in for a fight to the death.. of our planet.

Victory can only be achieved and net zero reached in time by forging a political alliance to provide the unity of purpose needed to win the most important battle in human history. Now is not the time for our political leaders to appease the powers of ‘business as usual’. Battle lines must be drawn. A CAB War Cabinet must be established and we must all sign up to the battle of our lives.