Mississippi thinking for climate innovation
This blog is adapted from two keynote speeches given at the Association for Geographic Information, and the Tyndall Centre’s 20th birthday celebrations
The beautiful images shown above are two meander maps created in the 1940s by Harold Fisk, a cartographer for the US Army Corp of Engineers in the US. He and his team travelled 650 miles along the length of the Mississippi River to identify how it has changed over time, looking at topographic engineering maps, the shapes of valleys and hills, and excavations made by the growing oil and gas industry.
In doing so, he mapped the evolution of the river’s path over thousands of years. It’s likely that the report was undertaken in order to support the Army Corp in mapping the natural flow of the river, to better understand how manmade levees and dams had altered its path.
Spaces and places change over time, sometimes iteratively, and sometimes dramatically. The human and societal systems that rely on the great Mississippi river have been fundamental to the economic development of the Southern states, and the whole of the US.
Complexity theory shows how geographical, social and biophysical systems are all bound up together. We can see this too in the way that the global economy has been rocked by Covid-19. The crisis has shown up systemic shortcomings, both in the capacity of states to address the enormous public health emergency; and in the resilience of international industry to immediate and sustained disruption. It has highlighted the pervasive inequality of our economies, and made clear the inaccuracy of our systems of value.
Our ‘key workers’ turned out to be the economic members that we pay the least, and of whom we demand some of the longest hours. Our responses to the pandemic were only able to be as good as the organisations and systems of value that we already had in place.
Complex incumbent systems and the direction of innovation
William Faulkner, who lived on and wrote about the Mississippi, said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. As we aim to transition towards a greener and more resilient economy, we do so on top of a web of traditional and immoveable power and economic structures that will be resistant to change. A clear example is how public sector incentives for renewable energy are often criticised, even though the fossil fuels sector gets more than 20 times more subsidies.
Investors and policymakers tend to focus on the rate of innovation. But innovation doesn’t just have a rate, it also has a direction. Innovation, and the finance that sits behind it, are not neutral elements which can be seen as positive outcomes, no matter what. Incumbency and lock-in are very real and tangible issues in the climate crisis, where the high value traditionally placed on carbon-intensive goods and services will be difficult to dislodge.
Crucially, the green transition cannot just sit in the traditional low-carbon sectors, like renewable energy, recycling, and natural capital — or take place only through the mitigation of high-carbon areas like fossil fuels and automobiles. Innovation must go far beyond picking sectors and pet projects, and instead add up to an economy-wide approach that truly addresses multiple complex systems and participants.
“the green transition cannot just sit in the traditional low-carbon sectors, like renewable energy, recycling, and natural capital”
This cannot be done in a vacuum of technical innovation, and cannot be deployed to only some demographics. Those working in polluting industries should not simply be displaced and devalued, but be fully skilled up for the transition. Organisations such as labour unions and citizens’ groups should be involved in co-designing the green transition, thinking in forward-looking ways to make sure the green economy is fit for all, and is developing public value as we transition.
As Majora Carter, an urban revitalisation strategist from the Bronx, says in her phenomenal 2006 talk, ‘Greening the Ghetto’, we have to ask, and be able to offer a legitimate answer, to the question of “Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighbourhood?”
Dynamic collaboration
Innovation is not built in one part of the economy alone, just as it must not be deployed in only one sector. The private sector does not have a monopoly on innovation. In fact, thinking as much leads to far less successful research and development outcomes. It removes the opportunities for spillovers to come from dynamic collaboration between private, public and civil society.
The internet is one example. The spread of information technology over the past 30 years has been one of the most rapid invention-innovation-diffusion processes in any technological revolution. But in its infancy, it was not clear that information technology would take off — it took early-stage risk-taking by the public sector to make the business case clear for investment.
Indeed, as Mariana Mazzucato showed in The Entrepreneurial State, all the areas that make our smart products smart were spillovers from projects originally funded by the public sector. Commercial and social applications quickly became evident, but only after the public sector had proven the technologies’ potential.
These are the kinds of innovation approaches that need to be urgently employed for the climate emergency. At the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, an approach we are developing is that of mission-oriented innovation. This involves creating economy-wide missions in the same way that Kennedy used the moonshot in the 1960s to target innovation on clear, ambitious, concrete goals. Mission-oriented innovation policy defines an ambitious goal, and then uses this to create long-term innovation landscapes, setting out concrete tasks that mobilise many actors for bottom-up experimentation across multiple, highly engaged sectors.
This means systems thinking, mass convening and planning, and high levels of ambition. We are working in close strategic partnership with a range of organisations applying these methods at international level, including the European Institute of Technology’s Climate-KIC.
Since March, our teams have been called on to work with organisations around the world on mission-oriented green economic renewal from the Covid-19 crisis, from the Italian government to South Africa’s Presidential Economic Advisory. Closer to home, we are setting up a Renewal Commission for the London borough of Camden, the borough of London where UCL is based.
We are always looking for new partners to collaborate with. If you would like to find out more about our work, or discuss possible partnerships, feel free to get in touch.
