The Best Tool We Have for Reversing Climate Change
The earth’s shifting climate presents the greatest opportunity that humans have ever had to show our ingenuity, our capacity for long-term thinking, and our ability to work together.
Climate change is going to have unavoidable impacts on human communities. One could go on about how this is horrible, depressing, doomsday news. But most of what there is to say on that subject has already been said.
Another idea is that climate change offers up an incredibly interesting set of challenges to work on. Even if it is a crisis of our own making, this is exactly the kind of crisis that human beings have evolved to confront.
So, how do we confront it?
That’s a bigger question than I’m equipped to answer. But I believe that one essential element is building resilience.
Climate Resilience?
A lot of times when people talk about climate resilience, they mean something very specific. It’s usually along these lines: “We need to start building highways above the flood line, so they don’t close down in high water.” Or, “We need to start relocating coastal communities, so people’s livelihoods aren’t washed away.” Or, “We need to build local capacity to deal with more severe droughts.”
Those are important ideas, but I’d like to broaden the definition a bit.
Generally speaking, resilience is the ability to “absorb disturbances, be changed and then re-organize and still have the same identity (retain the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity of self-organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.)”
This is a useful frame for thinking about how to address climate change for a few reasons. For one, it’s fundamentally open-ended, so it doesn’t require locking in on just one approach.
It also allows for learning and adaptation, which human beings happen to be really good at. Resilience lets us innovate and change as things change around us.
These are all good resources to have in the face of rapid, intense, global-scale transformations that become more dynamic and unpredictable as time goes on. (Which pretty well describes climate change.)
The Building Blocks of Climate Resilience
To become climate-resilient, human communities need to build, nurture, and activate networks that drive toward clearly defined, agreed-upon goals.
On the international level, we already have a clear goal: to keep Earth’s atmospheric temperature rise between 1.5ºC and 2ºC this century. We also have benchmarks to measure our progress. We’re supposed to peak global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reduce emissions to 50 percent of 2000 levels by 2050.
Although I have issues with the goal’s particulars (which I’ve written about before), it does have one thing going for it: alignment. With the Paris Agreement, 174 countries know what the goal is and have agreed in writing to achieve it.
That leaves networks.
Recently, there have been some extremely promising examples of network-based approaches to building climate resilience. Organizations and agencies have come together in unexpected ways to align on climate-related visions, share resources, develop ideas, act in concert, and learn together.
1. UN: Playing Well with Others
One example is happening inside the UN. In 2015, the same year the Paris Agreement emerged, the international community signed on to two more commitments: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
Together, these three form a glorious pyramid of international cooperation for resilience.
For the first time, a series of Technical Expert Meetings (TEMs) is convening decisionmakers and administrators under all three agreements to develop a plan for “pursuing the three global agendas collaboratively, as well as… options to support their further integration.”
In other words, they finally figured out that they all need to work together.
The report that followed the May 2017 TEM also acknowledged, “Adequate, sustainable support for adaptation efforts from sources public, private, international and national alike is crucial.”
This is huge. When an organization as clunky and quarrelsome and bureaucratic as the UN embraces this kind of cross-silo collaboration, it’s a signal that a big shift in mindset is underway.
2. Networked Cities
Back in 2008, the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) began working with city governments to enhance resilience to climate change.
In 2016, they wrapped up an eight-year pilot and have since spun up an independent network focused on “strengthening cities’ capacities to plan, finance, and implement urban climate change resilience.” ACCCRN is currently active in 40 cities across six countries.
Their reports overflow with examples of public-private-nonprofit collaboration. Take this one:
In Vietnam, where the topic of climate change is usually seen as the prerogative of one technical ministry (Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment — MoNRE), shared learning dialogues (SLDs) brought together a variety of provincial departments, “mass organizations” (Vietnamese state-affiliated civil society), lower levels of government, academic researchers, international and national technical resource persons and representatives of vulnerable groups (for instance, farmers and fishermen)…
This speaks to an important advantage of a networked approach: it allows for a lot of different types of expertise.
3. Being the Change
This shift from a territorial, competitive mindset toward a collaborative, networked mindset can also start small — with each of us.
My company, a Certified B Corporation, recently brought together three other B Corps to collaborate on a zero-carbon construction project in southern Taiwan. I’m using this intensively tracked and monitored project as an experiment. My hypothesis is that when mission-driven companies work together, they can drive more powerful systemic change—and turn higher profits—than any single company could do on its own.
I’m hoping this project becomes an example that inspires other social enterprises to work together.
Even though it’s a small-scale thing right now, it’s every bit as important as cooperation at the UN level. Because the center of any effective network—from the largest to the smallest—is a community.
Our communities are where our work begins, and where our resilience will ultimately be tested.
If resilience is one of the keys to dealing with climate change, and networks are the key to resilience, then how do we go about building robust, effective networks and activating them to drive toward shared goals?
In my experience, it requires focusing on a few critical areas.
1. Purposeful leadership
Network leaders prioritize purpose. This requires an internal re-alignment: putting purpose before personal gain and even before the interests of any one organization. Effective network leaders create constellations of complementary people and resources to deliver on the purpose. And they work to advance the mission even when they don’t directly benefit.
2. Room for self-interest
The first point doesn’t mean that every person in a network has to be motivated by super-human altruism (or even much altruism at all.) They simply need to be able to see their own reflection in the vision. Most people are driven by some image of success—large-scale impact or building strong relationships or personal satisfaction or anything else. Strong network leadership creates space for people to bring their own ideas of success into any collective action—and directs their energy toward the shared goals.
3. A bias toward action
Because there are so many nodes and inputs in a network, planning for all the potential scenarios that could unfold can become an extremely resource-intensive (and often fruitless) task. The key to managing this is a bias toward action—continuously experimenting and testing out new ideas in the real world. Minimum viable products (MVPs), fast iteration cycles, and continuous learning are the only way to keep up with the ever-shifting dynamics of a network.
4. Building on underlying systems of support
Most human communities — I’ll take cities as an example here — are already connected on multiple scales to other systems. These include investment and development networks, food production chains, transportation infrastructure, institutions, and knowledge-generation sites such as research universities.
It’s important to build on these existing systems, and to create space for different actors to contribute the expertise they’ve already developed. (This is partly because climate change isn’t leaving us much time to build new systems from scratch.) As Jane Wei-Skillern, of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business writes, “Everybody has to get really good at understanding they don’t have all the answers. It needs to be, ‘Here’s the problem, here’s what we bring to it, and where we add the most value. Here is where there are gaps that others can fill better than we can.’”
5. Flexibility and diversity.
A flexible and diverse network allows assets and functions to be distributed widely so that they are not all disrupted by any single shock. In a closely linked system, a relatively small failure can lead to cascading failures and, eventually, catastrophic breakdown. (Power blackouts are a good example of this.) But having a diverse and well-dispersed web of resources and actors can help to avoid these situations.
6. Openness and transparency.
Openness, transparency, responsiveness, and accountability are core virtues in an effective network. Every member of the network should be able to access accurate and meaningful information to assist them in making judgments on things like risk and vulnerability, as well as the actions they can take. (Ideally, the same information should also be available to the public.) It’s also important to build these principles into the group’s decision-making procedures. A strong network creates space for the voices of diverse people and groups — especially, in the case of climate change, those who are most affected by its downsides.
7. Continuous learning.
A network is constantly generating new knowledge and insights. It’s crucial to have tools in place to capture this output, and then systematize it, make it digestible, and distribute it regularly, so that others can apply what’s been learned before.
Working on these seven areas is great step to toward building effective networks. And the best place to begin is exactly where you are—in the communities you’re already part of.
However small or large those communities may be, start thinking about the people and resources you could convene to work toward a common vision. Then—here’s the bias toward action piece—kick off a conversation.
If you have ideas or you’re taking a network-based approach to addressing climate challenges, I’d love to hear what you’re doing. Please leave a comment or get in touch!
