A System Lens on Climate Solution Opportunity

As I continue my climate journey, one of my goals is to seek out parts of the climate-solution space where I can have the most impact. Since I’m coming to the table not with a preordained scientific solution, but with my full systems thinking toolbox and a model of the climate system, it’s only natural to take a systems lens on the problem — and thus to look for areas where things may not be going so well, where there’s an underappreciated opportunity to create change and unlock climate impact.

The system lens makes it possible to evaluate potential climate solutions and solution areas for opportunity, tractability, and readiness. It encourages a big-picture perspective, helping understand not just a climate-solution’s opportunity for impact (e.g. reduced CO2e emissions) but also whether the system forces are aligned with the solution — are they working to accelerate it, or hold it back, or are they neutral? — and whether the critical actors are in place to make the solution successful. From that holistic understanding, it becomes easier to see which solutions/areas are set up for success, which ones are underappreciated but have opportunity, and which are likely to be difficult or dead-ends.

For example, when I applied this systems lens and my climate-system model at the most aggregate level — to each of the 7 major sectors of climate solutions as defined by CTVC’s vertical solution taxonomy — some interesting patterns and insights immediately popped out.

Take a look at this matrix that scores the 7 major climate-solution sectors along the dimensions of system forces, actors, and impact (big caveat — my evaluation is based on the far-from-complete knowledge of the space I’ve managed to pick up in my readings and conversations, so might well have gaps and flaws. Would welcome input and happy to discuss methodology in more detail!):

Reading the matrix horizontally, you can see that a couple things stand out even with this coarse-grained perspective:

• The solution sectors of Transportation and Energy seem the most set-up for success, with relatively strong force alignment and actor readiness. This makes intuitive sense — look at all the investment, policy, stakeholder engagement, and economic models & incentives for proven technologies like renewables and EVs, and emerging (though nascent/unproven) work in areas like storage and aviation. These are sectors with traction, and a lot of existing activity — but maybe less untapped opportunity for system-oriented change.
• The weakest solution area — and hence one of the areas of greatest potential to do more? — appears to be in Industry, which, despite potentially addressing ~30% of global emissions, faces challenges across the board from investment levels to viability of solutions and economics, and less engagement/interest of key actors. For example, many high-carbon industrial processes (from steel to cement to petrochemicals) require vast amounts of energy and/or feedstocks that can’t easily be supplied via renewables today, and alternative solutions (like hydrogen and novel processes) are far from proven and economical at scale; likewise awareness, policy forces, and funding seem to be far lower in this space than others (e.g. only 11% of climate VC funding goes toward Industry in CTVC’s analysis).
• Climate management (covering areas like monitoring, emissions accounting, risk analysis, adaptation) also surfaces as weak in the scoring, thus popping out as a potentially interesting and under-invested area. While it doesn’t directly address emissions like some of the other solution sectors, climate management is a key data play that underpins all the other solutions, can play an accelerant role by building trust that those solutions are working properly, and fills important societal needs in the near term as we need to adapt to a changing climate.

There’s also insight we can get from looking at the matrix vertically. For example, we can see which forces are generally more and less aligned to push progress forward:

• Policy stands out as a positive force — largely due to recent movement in the US via the IRA; not sure this would have been so cheery had I been writing this post a few weeks ago.
• Economics and the Societal Context are the least aligned of the forces — perhaps unsurprising given the challenges of societal entrenched interests and unsustainable economics of many nascent climate solutions. This suggests that these areas are worth a closer look to understand what is going on and whether there are some cross-cutting points of leverage that could accelerate all the solution areas.

Similarly we can see opportunities to engage and align categories of actors — for example, with Producers, who in many cases have heavily entrenched interests that need to be overcome; or in activating Consumers more, which is a non-trivial problem but interesting to think about, e.g., where we could find high-scale touchpoints to inform and activate consumers (which relates to Societal Context as well).

Of course, all this sector-level analysis is super high-level and doesn’t yet highlight where systems analysis really shines — in understanding the interactions and interplay of forces and actors in order to strategize change. But it provides insight into where there might be some underappreciated opportunity lurking, and where that deeper systems analysis is warranted — just what I need at this stage in my climate journey.

Going forward, a natural next step is to repeat the analysis at a finer granularity, especially in the interesting solution areas identified above, and to add in that missing dimension of the interplay between forces. For example, a next step with Industry is to break it down into its major emitter components:

and then apply the systems forces/actor analysis to the finer-grained solution areas under those components.

Another interesting next step is to look more deeply at the “vertical slices” in the matrix, examining the opportunities for cross-solution acceleration by understanding what opportunity there is for tackling system forces like Economics and the Societal Context more directly, or activating Consumers.

I’ll be taking these next steps as I continue my climate journey with more systems analysis and thinking…stay tuned for future posts where I’ll share what I learn as I do. In the meantime, I continue to welcome feedback and conversation — I’d love to hear from you, especially if you’re also thinking about climate through a systems lens! Comment here or find me at abbrown at gmail.com.