Wanted: System Orchestrator

According to the European Commission’s draft regulation and the EU Green Deal, we are on a mission towards carbon neutrality by 2050. Ambitious enough on its own, decarbonisation is only one of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. In line with this framework, EIT Climate-KIC’s Deep Demonstrations are developing strategic experiments within a ‘portfolio approach’ to co-creating a prosperous, inclusive, climate-resilient society founded on a circular, zero-carbon economy. Strategic experiments are:

• A set of solutions aggregated at large scale, characterized by a multiple stakeholder structure.
• A whole life cycle concept involving the entire supply chains, as opposed to an offer that ends at the point of delivery.
• A cross-sectoral, systemic approach that links all sectors: construction, energy, transport & mobility, industry, vegetation and biodiversity, water, and food.
• An integral, multi-lever strategy that integrates technological solutions with policy, financing, citizen engagement, and data systems, in order to re-align incentives towards shared co-benefits.

Designing portfolios of strategic experiments needs to take into account whole life cycle costs of environmental and socioeconomic impacts. Time and financial resources are limited, so that a feasible large-scale strategy will need to identify the most effective actions using trade-off analysis across multiple criteria, focused on monitored co-benefits.

Cost- abatement curves at portfolio scale are a valuable tool we can use to prioritize the exploration of technological solutions. From the policy perspective, an interlocking portfolio of performance standards combined with long-term ‘feebate’ mechanisms has been identified as the most effective approach. A blended financing approach, leveraging stimulus budgets with private investment capital, while at the same time ensuring fair redistribution, could be at the base of a societal fund concept. Finally, citizen engagement and participation mechanisms could be integrated through interactive smart data platforms.

The real challenge lies in orchestrating all the above elements at once. One way to do this is to follow the concept of Theory of Change: visualize where you want to be, and work back from there.

An entity or coalition with long standing experience in innovation and a large network of partners would be in the ideal position of assuming the role of complexity orchestrator.