It’s the biggest and most complex challenge we’ve ever faced. Climate change is looking right at us. But what are we looking at?
Climate change is no longer on the horizon, it’s here. We see it in our humid summers, raging bushfires and unprecedented storms. It’s disrupting our supply chains*, displacing societies* and decreasing crop yields*. We’re heading into a climate catastrophe, but how did we get here?
It’s a question that we seem to be stuck on. But the fact that we’re stuck on it is even more bewildering. From the days of the industrial revolution and in the some 200 years since, it seems as though businesses have been wearing blinkers — blind to everything except the promise of money. Many governments and nonprofits did push to raise standards of living and lift people out of poverty and towards healthier lives. However, the efforts of governments in increasing employment opportunities and access to cheap energy were also factors that had little or no regard for the environment. This also invites us to the question of incentives; did we create employment opportunities specifically to benefit individual lives, or to increase the amount of people productively ($) contributing to society, and thus raising GDP. Financial tunnel vision led us to this point of very likely climate collapse. But now, many of our solutions are prioritising CO2, which is absolutely needed, but not at the expense of everything else.
Could carbon tunnel vision create another set of social and environmental catastrophes?
The sustainability challenge is often incredibly oversimplified — zero carbon. While carbon neutral and net zero emissions strategies (know the difference?) are undoubtedly imperative in slowing and reversing the effects of the climate crisis, we should also be aiming for a more inclusive, equitable and sustainable world. That kind of world needs more thoughtful approaches and solutions than just a reduction in carbon.
This concept, developed by Jan Konietzko, shows perfectly how if our blinkers simply switch from money bags to carbon emissions, we could lose sight of many of our human rights and environmental challenges. This is once more a way of saying, carbon reduction is not only the answer.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundaries and Donut Economics models also exist to show us the same thing. That we need multifaceted solutions to our climate crisis to stay within the bounds of a healthy, functioning society. This isn’t an 80/20 rule opportunity where 80% of our time is spent with carbon blinkers. But it is a reminder to look for complete solutions that cause no harm to any other environmental and human measure.
What are we missing?
We do need sustainability to be approachable, and carbon is a great entry point to understanding a big piece of our sustainability challenges. It’s also the largest driver of climate change so is our most pressing goal to decarbonise. But we need to constantly be aware of its limitations and what this way of thinking neglects. Using carbon as a measure for sustainability has been compared to using GDP as a measure for happiness. It misses the bigger picture. It’s a certain contributor, however we’re neglecting large amounts of crucial information, and that’s just not going to help. Just like a focus on growth created the climate crisis, a focus on only carbon could generate other social and environmental problems. In fact Climate Change is just one of the boundaries that we’ve passed the threshold of in the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Planetary Boundary model. The model also considers: novel entities, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, ocean acidification, biochemical flows (N and P), freshwater use (green and blue), land systems change and biosphere integrity (BII and E/MSY).
Let’s come back to CO2 though, and look at an example when CO2 has contributed to other problems in this model.
CO2 Tunnel Vision Consequences: An Example
In 1959 a Swedish inventor, Sten Gustaf Thulin, invented the plastic bag to save the planet. Yes, you’re reading this correctly, the plastic bag was considered more ecofriendly than paper alternatives which cut down trees and used a large amount of energy to mill into paper. The inventor’s son said his father would be shocked to know how plastic bags are treated today, as single use or disposable. But still, the inventor was onto something within the space of sustainability. Plastic uses an impressively small amount of CO2 to produce, plus their light weight means less fuel and resources are required to transport it. That’s why cucumbers are often wrapped in plastic, because the CO2 required for that is less than the CO2 that’d be released if the cucumber started to decompose. It’s also why people say you need to use the reusable shopping bag 200 times for it to have the same CO2 footprint of a single plastic bag.
The low CO2 footprint of plastic, as we know, isn’t everything. Plastic doesn’t decompose, sealife digest it, microplastics absorb chemicals and build up in organisms all the way up the food chain to us. On average, people consume roughly a credit card size of plastic per week (mostly from drinking water) and microplastics are even found in our blood now. The Novel Entities boundary is now transgressing far beyond what’s considered safe. Novel entities are essentially chemical pollution including largely pesticides, industrial compounds, antibiotics and plastic (and more plastic) amongst 350,000 chemical pollutants.
This example shows us why the terms “sustainable” and “eco-friendly” are so dangerous. Because the “sustainable” version might use less water, but have a higher carbon footprint. Or the products “sourced from nature” could have supply chains riddled with mistreatment, racism and exploitation. It shows us that carbon isn’t everything, and by focusing on one problem can have follow-on consequences in other areas of biodiversity, human health and ecosystem health.
Taking Off the Blinkers
There’s a popular concept called the “Eat that Frog” methodology. This is where we address the most urgent challenge first. That’s absolutely something we should do with Climate Change. If our climate collapses, there’s no way known by science to come back from it. In doing this though, we need to look at the full picture and address systems change where CO2e reductions are central, but where no significant harm is created for lives, livelihoods or ecosystems. The blinkers need to come off, but we need the goal at the front of our minds: Decarbonise. As. Fast. As possible.
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This was written in reflection of my work with Icos Capital, where I am designing a sustainability due diligence built around the EU Taxonomy, SDGs and the Planetary Boundaries — being the first known Venture Capital Firm to do so.
