Putting the climate emergency into perspective: from breakdown to breakthrough — a short primer on embracing regeneration (part 1)
Exploring Economics and Governance in a New World (10)
As part of a discussion panel at COP27 in Egypt on ‘regenerative innovation’ with a view of nudging actors to break out of the silos and consider the climate crisis — and its solutions — from a broader perspective, I prepared a short discussion brief for BMW Foundation’s RESPOND program. The brief was published in November 2022 and can be found online, while being replicated here in two parts, this being part 1. Part 2 can be accessed here.
Why we should aim to bring about a regenerative economy
We live in the Decisive Decade for climate action. Moreover, in recent years we’ve entered the Disruptive Decades: a period of time in which we find ourselves at a critical rupture point, oscillating between breakdown and breakthrough. A time of great turbulence and transformation, the outcomes of which will be determined not only by how well we’re able to leverage our technological capabilities to reduce emissions and tackle multiple environmental crises, but equally by how we transform society’s organizing systems. Whereas our technological capabilities determine the potential of a civilization, it’s the organizing systems -such as our economic, governance, and finance systems — which determine how close to this potential a society can get.
There is “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”
- UNEP, 27 October 2022
The (so called) constructs and rules of the game that we have put in place for our economy and businesses, better known as Neoliberalism or capitalism — as well as colonialism, have in recent decades put us on a path of nurturing an accelerated model of ‘degenerative economics’. One that has led to a point where we are now facing multiple planetary and social crises, including climate breakdown, pollution, and biodiversity loss, while fueling deep social inequity.
In parallel, the economic and financial wealth we generate is increasingly concentrated at the top in the hands of a minority rather than circulating broadly through the economy — in part the result of ‘trickle-up’ policies, which facilitate wealth accumulation by a small, privileged subset of the population. In the OECD, composed almost exclusively of higher-income nations, income inequality is the highest it’s been in several decades, while worldwide a rising number of people struggle to retain access to basic services such as energy, clean water, and nutritious food.
A major culprit is the way we have organized our current economic system. Built on a short-sighted and linear model of extraction and exploitation, whereby externalities remain mostly unaccounted for, today’s economy is fragile and deeply exposed to shocks — a model unfit for 10 billion people to thrive on the only planet we call home.
“Regenerative anything requires moving away from linear benchmarks, certainty and KPIs to an acknowledgment that things aren’t that simple. The basic design principle, if you look at regeneration, is biomimicry — trying to emulate nature”
— Louis Kjellerup Roper, CEO of VOLANS
Although exacerbated in the past 200 years by the views cultivated during the industrial revolution, a period in which many nations adopted a mechanistic worldview which considers human to be separate from their natural environment, and one in which nature in essence is viewed as a machine that can be understood and managed by reducing it to its parts, extractive economic models aren’t confined to the recent history of capitalism and preceding that, colonialism.
The ‘age of extraction’ already started a few thousand years earlier, with even the Romans adopting a winner-take-all production system, concerned mainly with maximizing income from useful outputs for the center. Previous leading civilizations were often blind to the long-term effects of the system’s negative impacts in terms of the finite nature of resources and the human and social impacts of production. And they carried on until it was too late, prioritizing the short over the long-term and the narrow over the common interest.[1]
This is the context for collapse. Even with the introduction of short-term fixes, perpetuating the current model will continue to diminish our capacity to recover. While the proximate cause leading to the eventual implosion is usually pandemics, war, social unrest, long periods of drought or environmental degradation, the context has been set far earlier: a civilization that has passed the limits within which it can sustain itself and has lost the ability to adapt at every level. The choice as such is stark: breakdown or breakthrough.
This is where the regenerative economy comes in. Now is the time to bring greater clarity to this transformative concept and move from theory to action. Just as humans have actively designed their separation from the natural world, we can aim to reverse design this back in. The climate crisis in that regard is part of a larger imperative for humankind to bring patterns of life back to a positive relationship with the earth. As we live through the chaos and uncertainty of a change in era, we have a unique opportunity to truly rethink the theoretical framework that guides humanity’s relationship with the natural world and each other.
It starts with mindset — adopting a regenerative worldview
As we mentioned in the previous section, the climate crisis is part of a larger imperative for humanity to positively re-align patterns of life with our planetary systems and within that, with other living beings. One of the most essential aspects of moving to a regenerative economy is the adoption of a new worldview. The first step on the path to regeneration as such is not a change of techniques but a change of mind. This worldview is often called the living systems worldview, acknowledging that living systems are never static and that humans are inseparable from the natural world and its living systems. Humans are thus a nested living system within the planetary ecosystem.
Every culture in history has (had) a worldview: a cultural story that explains reality and what it means to be human. These stories tell us things such as what is important in life, the nature of reality, how to understand the world, and other basic attitudes. Each era of social evolution has a basic story that cultures subscribe to, and within that, each individual culture holds their own particular worldview based on the larger story.
The regenerative or living systems worldview stands in stark contrast to the mechanistic worldview of the industrial era, adopted particularly by nations in the Global North. The industrial or ‘modern’ worldview tells a story of separate individuals and groups, competing for success in a mechanical and rational world. We understand this world through rational thought and scientific experimentation; and meaning is not derived from the communion with nature — or even the divine — but from achievement, success, and progress. Within this, bigger is better and the winners in the race to the top deserve the primary share of power.
As we are coming to the end of the story of the industrial/modern era and have entered an era of change, we increasingly find ourselves between stories — no longer at ease with the old story, but not fully embracing or living a new one yet. From this junction, we can head in multiple directions: populist and neo-nationalist views are on the rise as people seek alternative ways of explaining the world. A small but growing contingent however is starting to explore the regenerative worldview.
Within this view, humans are autonomous yet related as individuals and groups, while participating in a dynamic, complex, and intelligent whole. Humans may in fact be the self-reflexive lens of a meaningful, intelligent universe. Collaboration and cooperation are primary values, while we understand the world by combining science with systems thinking and other modes of knowing. The meaning of our lives reveals itself as part of a larger whole. As mankind, we aren’t merely concerned about the good of the parts but equally that of the whole. As we leverage resources and the natural world for our wellbeing, we aim for a size and scope that reflect a balance between efficiency and effectiveness, while retaining resilience — also known as (thriving within) the window of vitality.
“Life creates conditions conducive to life” , which eloquently expresses nature’s most important lesson and humanity’s main creative challenge for the 21st century
— Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Institute
When we consider this in the context of the economic system, we can understand a regenerative economy as one which applies nature’s laws and patterns of systemic health, self-organisation, self-renewal and regenerative vitality to socio-economic systems. Behind this sits the idea of holism, in which individual actions cannot be understood without considering their influence on the whole. Shifting one’s understanding of the world by seeing and feeling the interconnections between all living things, including humans, is therefore the first step before the real work can start.
How this is relevant to the climate crisis and humanity’s survival
We are living in a time marked by great upheaval and change, where the gradual breakdown of our global systems has become almost impossible to ignore. Leaders — both political and business — are being forced to cope with a rising and dazzling array of challenges, from pandemics to major supply chain disruptions, from unpredictable climate patterns to political extremism.
Nonetheless, the world’s decision makers have by and large, until now, considered and managed many of the world’s sustainability challenges in isolation from one another. Environmental and social issues are generally being treated as separate domains; and even environmental crises — such as climate and biodiversity loss — tend to be dealt with in relative silos, as exemplified by having their own dedicated conference of parties (COP).
“The truth is, we have been poor custodians of our fragile world. Today, the earth is facing a triple planetary crisis: climate disruption, nature and biodiversity loss, pollution and waste. The triple crisis is threatening the well-being and survival of millions of people around the world… putting the sustainable development goals in jeopardy.”
— UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
This is in part rooted in in the earlier mentioned paradigm of the world as a machine, where problems are best solved by breaking them down into smaller parts. Although this may work well for addressing singular issues and causes, this approach doesn’t lend itself too well for addressing complex, interrelated sustainable development challenges. Today’s major issues despite having their own set of causes and effects have strong interlinkages with each other.
To meaningfully transition through the present times towards a new paradigm of thriving — rather than one of merely surviving, which is where we’re currently heading — leaders must take a more systemic perspective that recognises the true complexity of, and the interactions between, the challenges faced by our world today. Moreover, solving the climate crisis won’t suffice for humanity to have a viable future. We need to address an increasingly long list of crises and calamities, while fundamentally changing our worldview, in order to stand a good chance at moving to a state of planetary and societal well being. This also means that we have — and can — learn to thrive within our planetary boundaries, seeing them not so much as something that curtails our freedom, but rather consider them ‘enabling constraints’, providing us with the context — also known as the “safe operating space” for humanity — within which we can create abundance for all.[2]
As the old systems and structures are slowly starting to break down, we can witness pioneers all over the world exploring novel and re-imagining contemporary solutions to live, govern and conduct business in ways that contribute to rather than degrade life on earth. At the same time, we see many governments, as well as individuals, become stuck in a type of narrow-sighted climate paralysis, whereby instead of truly analysing how to initiate broad systems impact, there is a tendency to jump on the solutions right in front of us. The larger intent and underlying problem get lost amidst red tape and a suite of multi-year policy processes, that aren’t necessarily designed to be in close alignment with each other or to address the challenges in a holistic manner.
There certainly is a need for immediate action, even though our current predicament has been brewing for a long time. The scale of required intervention however necessitates change in broader systems; systems that often tend to move slowly due to the intricacies and workings of our existing bureaucracies. Systems that still represent the dominant way of ‘how things are done here’ and despite their lack of fit for the future, help enable the status quo; just as there are many people who will choose to ignore the evidence of crises around them till it noticeably starts to impact their lives. Not through malicious intent, but because of the way we’ve become hard-wired as humans through a few hundred thousand years of evolution, in which a focus on near-term problems as they present themselves has till this day often been our dominant modus operandi for survival.
This means we have to learn how to work with existing systems that are breaking down, while nurturing the conditions for a new system to emerge. And in doing so, we have to step outside the silos that are so entrenched into our daily and professional lives and aim for close collaboration and co-creation, as no one entity has the answer to the challenges we’re facing. These dynamics are well presented in the Three Horizons model, in which the first horizon represents the way things are currently done, which show signs of strain and are no longer fit for purpose; the third horizon shows how we want things to be in the future (the vision), while the second horizon is an arena of transition, where innovations get established to help make our desired future a reality. [3]
Within this second horizon, we can in fact distinguish between innovations which, even if helpful in the short term, are unlikely to bring about the deep change we’re after and are mainly improvements on the current ways of working, as well as those innovations that can be considered transformative and may bring forth the new vision in the third horizon. BMW Foundation’s RESPOND program aims to operate within the latter window, to help accelerate the transition to the third horizon by creating an enabling environment for ambitious impact-driven entrepreneurs to thrive. The world however needs many more as well as a broad diversity of regenerative initiatives if we are to transition onto the third horizon before our current first horizon path takes us on a free fall to a point of no return.
(Continue with Part 2)
[1] For further reading, refer to “Rethinking Humanity”, https://www.rethinkx.com/humanity
[2] Refer to the work of Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics) and Daniel Christian Wahl (Designing Regenerative Cultures) to read more about thriving within the safe operating space for humanity
[3] Read more about Three Horizons at International Futures Forum, https://www.iffpraxis.com/three-horizons
