We and the World
Part of the story that I tell to myself and others about why I have dedicated a big part of my life to climate change goes back to 1987 and my favourite elementary school course. It was accompanied by a book that was called “We and the World”.
Digging out with a casual click in “google images” the cover of a book that I have not seen for 33 years, feels disproportionately easy in relation to the journey in time and place I instantly make and the strong feelings it brings up. The cover takes me back straight into childhood time and reminds me of how beautiful the book’s cover actually was. I only appreciate this now. Children from different cultures from around the world, hold hands and dance around our blue planet.
The course covered in a simple and colourful way key aspects of natural history, geography, physics, biology, astronomy, that children and sometimes even adults should know about, the things that involve and connect humanity and the world. It was taught to us by a wonderful man who became like a second father to me, the teacher of all of the courses in our class until completing elementary school.¹
Ιn the book there was an image that showed a bunch of sunrays going under the clouds and getting trapped in the atmosphere. This was the first time I heard about something called the “greenhouse effect” and how it was causing our planet to become warmer and warmer over time. It was a claustrophobic feeling. Surely people are working on solving this issue, I thought. A few years later, I followed the 1992 earth summit in Rio based on what was shared with us via the national TV station and got some hope that people were on top of this. It was then that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC — UN Climate Action) was signed. A few years later the Kyoto protocol was put in place but it was voluntary and the big emitters like the US and others were not taking part in it. Yet another few years later it became clear that we weren’t making progress, at least not at the scale and pace that was necessary.
By the early 2000s, I had decided that I wanted to work on the climate change challenge. I went on to work first on climate mitigation and decarbonisation and then on climate risk, resilience and adaptation. I spent almost a decade, during the first half of my career working for a multinational sustainability consulting firm primarily producing knowledge and advising multinational organisations and their leaders on what to do when it comes to climate change. Our implicit theory of change was “if they only knew more or better… then the problem would be solved”. While the knowledge we produced and shared did help a few, I observed that the vast majority of reports and recommendations we produced with my team sat on shelves collecting dust (or in the cloud collecting stardust). It bothered me. I was climbing swiftly through the ranks in the organisation, and at the same time, my work started to feel more and more meaningless. Finally, I reached the point where I was about to enter the track to make partner at the firm. I was at a crossroads. Do I keep doing this work or do I start working in a different way to produce an impact in the world commensurate with the scale of the challenge and if so how? Clearly, we have most of the knowledge and technical solutions we need to make the progress that we must. So what is stopping us? What I was realising was that simply new understandings are not enough. We also need new agreements to deliver large scale change, as well as the intention and the will to collaborate at scale to reach such new agreements at a systemic level.
I quit my job and dedicated my practice in the second decade of my professional life to focus on that. My work involves developing and delivering processes that can help stakeholders in complex systems to come to not only new understandings but also to new agreements and sustained collaborative efforts to move forward together. This is the work that we are doing at Reos Partners. An example of our energy transition work is the e–Lab which was created by the Rocky Mountain Institute working with Reos Partners. The e-Lab brings leading energy practitioners together to solve key problems at the frontier of the energy transition creating trust and accelerating the pace at which collaborations succeed. An example of our climate resilience work is the Inclusive Insurance Innovation Lab (iii Lab). Working with the Access to Insurance Initiative (A2ii) and InsuResilience Global Partnership, we are leading innovation labs with the insurance sectors of multiple countries around the world to build innovative insurance solutions that increase the resilience of the most vulnerable segments in our society against the impacts of climate change.
This is rewarding, and impactful work, but I am coming to realise as I am slowly approaching my third professional decade that what we have been doing is also not enough. Not anymore. Hundreds of climate collaborations have been bringing together diverse stakeholders from across multiple organisations and systems for years now and many are only producing incremental change. The scale and pace of progress are not catching up to the extent and acceleration of the climate emergency.
Going through the long-distance that we need to cover both in terms of climate change mitigation (i.e. emissions reductions) and adaptation is a marathon. And since we have not been progressing on the issue as we should or could have over the last century,² we need to act swiftly. We only have 20 years. So we need to run a marathon but at the pace of a 100-meter sprint. And anyone running this way will face and would need to come to terms with a lot of pain.
The security implications from the energy shock, the high prices and the social inequality that we are experiencing right now in Europe and globally with the Russia-Ukraine conflict are making all the more obvious some of the economic implications, challenges and scale of transformation that we would need to face if we were to really choose a transition pathway that will get us where we need to be in time. History has shown that war and external shocks have the power to reshape the political economy of energy systems profoundly — World War II provides one example of an energy transition to hydroelectricity in Canada³ and there are others. We need and now have a new sense of urgency and emergency. Europe has been complacent in treating its addiction to fossil fuel dependency on Russia and other countries. There are many good reasons for this but starting with the obvious ones, it is neither easy nor cheap. Even the most cost-optimal pathway for the EU to reach net-zero would require investing an estimated €28 trillion according to McKinsey.⁴ The trajectory of this pathway looks as if emissions are falling off a cliff from 2020 onwards, especially for the power sector. Powerful players will lose out (and hence so will those who depend on them like employees, workers, communities, investors, pensioners, politicians).
The present conflict is giving Europe a burning platform for politicians, policymakers, community leaders, businesses, activists and NGOs. The impetus to move fast to a decarbonisation pathway is here and the time is now. Actors serious about energy transition who bring the ambition and determination required must come together in a call to “carbon arms”. Not only the obvious actors but also the unlikely ones, across societal and economic sectors, need to work together with the determination and mobilisation of a “war effort” delivered during times of (relative) peace that reaches people’s heads, hearts and minds.
There will be losers during this societal transformation. This would require societal collaboration and coordination on a scale not experienced in a living generation, both at the highest and grassroots community levels. Beyond the economics, policies and technologies, we need to challenge the implicit assumptions, paradigms and narratives that perpetuate the present and stall the birth of a decarbonised future such as “uninterrupted, abundant and cheap energy”, “personal transportation”, “eating meat every day”, “getting on a plane for a long weekend or a day meeting”. In their place, we must re-create, communicate and normalise a new set of societal paradigms and mental models for the energy transition to be brought about.
“If you want to go fast, go alone but if you want to go far, go together.” This old adage is not sufficient for what needs to happen because we need to do both. We need to go faster, we need to go further and we need to go together my colleague Adam Kahane said to me the other day.
One night a few weeks before I wrote this piece I was turning around in my bed trying to get to sleep and an image came to me about the climate situation we are in right now. I imagined a hundred people holding hands just like the children on the cover of the “We and the World” book. What needs to happen now is for these people to hold hands and run a marathon but at the pace of the 100-meter sprint without letting each other’s hands go. This is the scale and level of challenge, in terms of space, time and need for coordination, collaboration, grit and determination.
I asked my partner to review this article before I post it. She gave me the nod of approval but wasn’t looking 100% convinced. I probed. “Well…” she said, “it's a good article but what is the solution?” I stumbled on the question and paused for a bit, feeling a little sad. Then I told her “I don’t know”. That’s the humble truth. I don't know but I can try things and a good start is to stay focused, be willing to continuously attend to where our impact can be greatest, think about who else we need to collaborate with to amplify our impact, and transform ourselves, our lives and the work that we do every day. Is this enough? I don't know but it might be a good start.
This decade has been called the decisive decade for good reason. At Reos Partners, our intention for this decade is to take our climate work beyond individual programmes and support large scale, multi-sector, sustained, impactful, collaborations. And my own promise and commitment is to make our intention at Reos Partners visible and engage with others who share this ambition. What is yours?
[1]: In Greece, the education system was set up so that one teacher stays with one class through the 6 grades of elementary school from 6 until 12 years old and delivers all the courses until these children graduate to gymnasium (where this changes and you have specialised teachers creeping in). This gives the educator or the pedagogue the opportunity to get to know the children deeper and adjust parts of the curriculum according to each child’s needs, develop unique relationships. This always made a lot of sense to me (if you are lucky to have a good teacher because if unlucky then you are stuck).
[2]: In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming. Gilbert Plass formulated the Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change in 1956.
[3]: Evenden, Matthew. “World War as a Factor in Energy Transitions: The Case of Canadian Hydroelectricity.” In: “Energy Transitions in History,” edited by Richard W. Unger, RCC Perspectives 2013, no. 2, 91–94.
