What is Forceful Stewardship?

Since 2014 I have served on the Board of Preventable Surprises, a CIC devoted to challenging investors to better anticipate and address financial disasters arising from systemic risks such as climate change and biodiversity loss.  Founded by the inspiring Raj Thamotheram but supported by some of the world’s leading financial experts, it is dedicated to the concept of Forceful Stewardship, the active, disruptive and ethical (and occasionally radical) role that shareholders should take in their investments.  Crucially, we challenge large corporate and charity investors (including hedge funds and pension funds) to fulfill their legal obligations to their clients by adopting an active role in avoiding systemic risks either through shareholder engagement or divestment.  In doing so, we have widened the the ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) shareholder community.  But we also hold those investors accountable to their legal obligations and to their pledges, identifying patterns of inconsistent voting and problematic behaviour.

This is not an initiative I ever anticipated joining.  I am not an expert on finance and investment.  I am quite skeptical of the free market approach with which this project is inherently in dialogue.  I joined because it complemented the Divestment agenda of student colleagues at the University of Bristol and because it was an opportunity to modestly step into environmental activism and learn from that.

And it has achieved both of those goals.  Bristol was one of the first Universities to divest from fossil fuels, a journey bracketed by a 2015 pledge to carbon neutrality and the first academic declaration of a Climate Emergency in 2018.  Key to that was my involvement at PS and the insight it gave me into responsible investor behaviour. Organisations, including the University of Bristol, were countering the global divestment campaign by arguing, often cynically so, that more could be achieved by holding investments and serving as engaged stakeholders. However, few if any of them have the capacity – let alone the will – to act in such a manner. At Bristol, these discussions and an honest recognition of what we could achieve paved the path towards divestment as the ethical and appropriate alternative.

At the same time, Preventable Surprises helped me redefine the parameters of my own environmental activism, facilitating my shift from being a scientific expert politely contributing knowledge to policy debate but restrained from critiquing it to a far more radical view of directly challenging government failure to act on the Climate and Ecological Emergencies. In particular, it provided a gateway to activism because Preventable Surprises does not advocate for any particular solution or action, a more comfortable position for scientists who are reluctant to step outside of their area of expertise. Instead, PS advocates for investors to do no more than adhere to their legal obligations and their own pledges to ethical behaviour. My view towards activism has changed significantly over the past decade, and my involvement with Preventable Surprises has been central to that.

Below is some further information on Preventable Surprises and the Forceful Stewardship model it has championed for ethical investment.  And below that, some further personal reflections on what this approach can achieve and whether a more radical approach is needed. I think that I have probably given and learned as much as I can from this initiative.  I think that we are identifying the limits of what even the strongest free market interventions can hope to achieve.  I think I am ready for the next stage of my own social and environmental activism.  But responsible investment still has a crucial role to play.

From the Preventable Surprises website:

For many years, Preventable Surprises has been addressing financial disasters that investors could–and should–have seen coming. Concerns about BP’s safety record, the accounting practices of Tesco, sloppy mortgage lending–these were in the public domain for years before disaster struck. Preventable Surprises, a community interest company, is a ‘think-do’ tank that seeks to prevent, or at least mitigate, corporate and market implosions.

We work with a group of positive mavericks within the investment industry to persuade and cajole the financial sector to better address systemic risks. Using climate change as an example, we define systemic risks using three features:

  • They are pervasive and not confined to a sector or territory. The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board found that 72 of the 79 industries in the SASB classification system are affected by climate change.
  • They are non-linear with unpredictable tipping points. The long-term climate transition will almost certainly be volatile and messy. Global temperatures and rainfall may rise incrementally on average but extreme changes will be localised and deadly.
  • They are inter-related, making it impossible to predict the likelihood of Black Swan events.

While regulators, the media, NGOs and consumers each have a role to play in building a more transparent and sustainable market system, most of the power lies with corporations and their investors. Preventable Surprises focuses on institutional investors because, through the trillions of dollars in assets under their management, they have enabled corporate and market dysfunction. While this may be unintentional, the continuing damage caused to investors and to ecosystems in untenable.

Long-term investors cannot use stock-picking or hedging strategies to avoid systemic risk. In the case of climate change, institutional investors’ end beneficiaries will pay the price as the extent of portfolio risk is revealed. That is why investors must mitigate systemic risk through forceful stewardship. As fiduciaries, they must go beyond private engagement to publicly vote for resolutions at AGMs that force companies to align with the 2°C scenario envisaged in Paris.

Forceful stewardship complements the normal approach to responsible investing – in which traditional investment decision-making is overlaid with a filter for environmental, social and governance issues – by focusing on the rights that investors have as owners. But forceful stewards also go beyond private engagements with investee companies, which lack transparency and are hampered by conflicts of interest. Many of us and those we work with are deeply pro market. But as experienced insiders, we know there are many reasons why the financial industry ignores systemic risks, such as climate change, until it is too late.

“Forceful stewards” engage with companies, and use their full influence to make business part of the solution to address systemic risks. They vote for resolutions to send a public signal and thus to drive deeper and faster corporate change. And forceful stewards also engage with all the other players involved in investment – from research analysts to investment consultants to regulators – to ensure they, too, play their part in addressing systemic risks.

In summary, a forceful steward does three things:

  1. Indicates in advance a willingness to vote in favour of resolutions requesting action to address systemic risks, and to vote against management if the company has repeatedly failed to take action to limit systemic risk.
  2. Makes it clear in private engagements with board directors and senior executives that box ticking will not be sufficient; results matter and should match the urgency of the situation.
  3. Requires fund managers, sell-side research, credit rating agencies, and investment consultants to review corporate disclosures and advise on portfolio implications. And advocates for essential regulatory changes that align incentives in financial markets with risk mitigation and long-term wealth creation.

Why do I personally think that Forceful Stewardship is so important?

Forceful stewardship is not a participation prize for showing up.  It is not box ticking.  It is not about empty gestures, many of which cannot be evaluated. It demands action. It centres accountability.  I joined in 2014 but writing this in 2022, I look back on nearly a decade of Climate Emergencies, Pledges, Commitments to Net Zero – and despairingly little action towards those.  Words must precede action.

Our most successful campaign was the Missing 60, in which we identified the 60% of investors who had voted against climate risk resolutions for US companies but in favour of near-identical resolutions for European companies – simply because the former opposed those resolutions and the latter did not.  That is not leadership.  That is not accountability.  That is not the action of a fund manager acting in the best, well-informed interest of their clients.

Forceful stewards do not sit on the sidelines or follow the crowds.

But nor do Forceful Stewards dictate the nature of action.  Climate change is a challenge, but no one has a monopoly on the solution.  Arguably, inferred assumptions of what those solutions must be has been a major part of its politicisation – political divides around science have arisen not from the science itself (although it is not free from critique) but rather from ideological divides around free market vs government intervention.  I have my own opinions about what is needed to tackle a challenge of this magnitude and they do involve ‘big government’ interventions and multi-state coordination, but Preventable Surprises is not the forum for sharing those views.  It demands action but is agnostic to the political, behavioural, financial or technological action an organisation takes; it only demands that the action be legitimately engaged with the nature and magnitude of the systemic risks an organisation faces.

This approach has given Preventable Surprises legitimacy and influence in surprising places.

However, it also exposes the limitations of any approach that is embedded within the free market rather than challenging its existence. Corporate actions can be legitimate responses to the climate emergency but replicate other sector sins; copper and lithium mining and major hydro-energy projects can damage the environment and perpetuate inequality just a much as climate change can.

Their are limits to what the free market can achieve because the one thing it can never do is return power and wealth to others at its own expense. In fact to do so is in direct contradiction of the Preventable Surprises core approach – demanding that companies recognise climate change because climate change is a risk to the investment.

Those businesses might change but they will always extract.

Some final reflections

Many of my colleagues are very pro free market.   Or more precisely, they are in favour of the most noble possible vision of the free market.  Preventable Surprises aspires to make the most of our current socio-political system.  And inevitably, any solutions that arise from Preventable Surprises’ interventions will be market-driven ones.

I do not share that optimism. Those of you who follow this blog or my twitter account know that I am not ‘pro market.’  On some days I am quite skeptical of capitalism and other days I am anti-capitalist.

But I currently live in a capitalist country and capitalist forces shape the world.  Forceful Stewardship is about making that system work as ethically as it can.  Like the fossil fuel divestment campaigns, we understand that we are in the game and so we play the game.  I do not think that market solutions will solve the climate problem – and even if they did, I suspect they would give rise to an equally exploitative and colonial ‘green’ energy economy – but we do what we can within the constraints imposed upon us.

That is something.  We all do our best to make the world a better place. I am proud of what we have achieved.

But these campaigns have served another purpose – and this is why they are now serving as a springboard for a step change for my own environmental activism.  Divestment and shareholder activism are exposing the limits of what our current socio-economic system can achieve.  In striving to make the free market behave as ethically as possible, they spotlight its limitations.

When even best practice and the most well-meaning actors fail to create an environmentally and socially just world, then we have run out of excuses for avoiding far more radical change.

 

Complex Cities in an Uncertain World

My contribution to the Festival of Ideas sponsored Festival of the Future City 

Photo by David Iliff. License CC-BY-SA 3.0

Half of the planet lives in cities. By the middle of this century, that number will rise to nearly 75%, nearly 7 billion people. The decisions we make today will dictate whether those future cities are fit for purpose, whether they are just, sustainable, vibrant, resilient and pleasant. But those decisions must navigate an increasingly perilous web of urban complexity and global uncertainty.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Niels Bohr famously said,  ‘Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future,’ a quote that recognises and subverts the very nature of the scientific endeavour. Scientists aspire to understand something well enough that we can predict what will happen under certain conditions in the future, whether it be a chemical reaction or nuclear fission – or administering a drug or raising interest rates. In fact, prediction is the basis for all decision makers, not just doctors and engineers but mayors, CEOs, teachers and you. Whether it is predicting when you will run out of bread or predicting whether a residential parking scheme will bring about a net positive change to a congested city, we all make decisions based on what we think is about to happen or will happen if we take an action. In a simple world, we barely need to think about these things because the pattern has been reproduced numerous times or the solution will clearly address the challenge.

But we do not live in a simple world. We live in a complex world – an astonishingly complex world in which the landscape is changing faster than our ability to map it.

People are complex: our emotions, motivations, desires and fears make us notoriously (and wonderfully) difficult to understand and predict. Society is complex: our communities, whether they be geographical, historical, ethnic or religious, interact in marvellously messy ways. And most of all, our cities are complex. Beautifully, fantastically, unpredictably, frustratingly and vibrantly complex. Cities represent tens or hundreds or even thousands of years of ad hoc expansion, destruction and redevelopment; the accumulation of technological and infrastructural strata, from ancient paths, to great roads, to modern electrical grids, to smart city digital networks; and vast demographic changes including an aging population, migration, globalisation and a frightening increase in social inequality.

That is just the complexity within a city, but cities are not isolated from the rest of the world. They are nodes within a vast and increasingly complex global supply chain on which we depend for everything from our food and electricity to our culture and entertainment.

And adding yet additional layers of complexity are our global environmental and societal challenges. We are warming the planet and depleting it of vital resources. Those would be challenging enough given the complex interdependencies that now define 21st century society. Unfortunately, global warming could change our planet in ways that are unique in human history and possibly geological history. We have not experienced and our models cannot fully constrain this uncertain world. Forecasts for rainfall patterns, extreme weather events or food production are fraught with uncertainty – and by extension, so are forecasts for political insecurity and financial markets.

How does the complexity intersect and overlap, how do these systems merge, either dampening or enhancing their collective impacts? How will climate change and food insecurity, for example, exacerbate inequality? We do have tools for navigating these complex systems – ranging from cognitive shortcuts in decision making to community histories to sophisticated models. However, those are almost all based on experience, and experience loses value when the ground rules are changed. Our vast experiment with the Earth’s climate and ecosystem – making our world not just complex but complex and uncertain – makes it harder for scientists to predict the future, decision makers to plan and individuals to act with creative and empowering agency.

Of course, complexity need not be bad. Complexity and change can bring about positive challenges, shaking us out of complacency and inspiring creativity. Perhaps even more inspiring, complexity could be harnessed as a tool for connection rather than isolation. Although our interdependence makes us particularly vulnerable to conflict or instability on the far side of the planet, it also makes us all invested in one another’s lives. This also applies to the urban scale as exemplified by Bristol is Open, in which an additional layer of complexity – a publicly shared digital infrastructure managed by a smart city operating system – could generate new platforms for social cohesion. It could be a new set of cross-city linkages, a digital commons, or a shared lab for city-scale experimentation in which all of us are the scientists.

Ensuring how our complex cities thrive in an uncertain world is a rather exciting challenge that will likely require a range of solutions. During the Festival of the Future City we will explore both what it means to be a citizen in a complex city, how we navigate that complexity both on a personal and societal scale, and the new technologies that create both new challenges and new opportunities. In some cases, we should avoid unnecessary uncertainty, such as potentially devastating climate change. In others, we should harness the social and economic opportunities it presents. But in all cases, we ourselves must change. A more complex world requires a more resilient citizen or community, one that is empowered to learn, to improvise and to create.

How can Bristol lead on Climate Action after COP26?

In 2015, I joined the Bristol delegation to COP21 in Paris, where the world agreed to limit warming to less than 2C and aspired to limit warming to 1.5C.

Six years later, COP26 comes to the UK, and delayed by Covid, it comes in the aftermath of an IPCC report that starkly highlights how inadequate our efforts have been to meet those Paris 2015 aspirations.

The Step Change Yet to Happen

It would be a mistake to argue that nothing was achieved in Paris.  The agreement – and the subsequent increase in ambition of the UK Climate Change Act to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – appears to have had an impact on governments and legal decisions. Although the declaration of Climate Emergencies, starting in Bristol and spreading widely, is largely symbolic, the political recognition of climate change and on-the-record commitment to decarbonisation exerts a pressure on policy.  Most obviously, it has (for the time being) prevented the expansion of both Bristol and London Airports.  These government commitments have also exerted pressure on energy infrastructure and contributed to the UK’s decreasing carbon emissions. Globally, even though CO2 emissions and concentrations continue to climb, they are ever so slowly bending away from the worst case scenario, which tellingly was once called the Business as Usual scenario.

Most importantly, however, the Paris Agreement has invited and legitimised a long overdue surge in activism.  Friday Strikes, marches, and rallies on College Green as well as the more disruptive interventions of XR have forced climate action onto the media and political agenda.  We also see this in the more activist intervention of climate scientists.  Our activism is not just driven by government inaction on our warnings for over 50 years, but also because those same governments have now established their objectives in law and international agreements. Is taking to the streets really ‘activism’ if it is just asking governments to do what they are legally as well as morally compelled to do – by their very own admission?

But let’s not deceive ourselves.  By necessity the Paris Agreement was non-binding.  Globally, emissions still increase; bending away from 5C of warming to perhaps 3C of warming is not reassuring.  Moreover, very little meaningful – transformative – change has happened. We have achieved a decrease in emissions and that is cause for some celebration.  But that has largely been achieved by switching from coal to gas,  but we still fundamentally rely on burning things to generate our heat, electricity and transport.  We have made incremental gains by grabbing the low-hanging fruit.  This is true of the UK and it is true of Bristol. And our delays mean that the window of time for driving emissions to zero has shrunk dramatically.  Even the most optimistic scenarios of the most recent IPCC report lean heavily on carbon capture.

Community Collaboration and Action 

As we approach COP26, therefore, where can Bristol lead? Are we powerless as a city if national governments fail to act?

In this it is worth reflecting why Bristol was awarded the Green Capital honour for 2015.  It was largely because of the number and variety of organisations, from volunteer groups of 2 to 3 people to civil society organisations and CICs to charities to businesses and to local government, united in their pursuit of an environmentally sustainable future.  Bristol cannot solve climate change but it can show the world that we are not powerless in the face of national government prevarication. Too often the climate debate is split between those arguing for individual action vs structural change at a national level.  Not only is this a false dichotomy (clearly we need both), but more importantly it misses the most important agent of change: communities.

Communities amplify individual action.

Communities create pressure for wider political change.

Communities come up with novel solutions and the solutions that will be most effective for them.  In doing so, they learn fast, learn hard, fail, learn again.  And then they share.

Climate Action that Centres Environmental and Social Justice

Community leadership and collaboration is also vital in addressing the other major theme that has emerged in the climate movement since COP21: It is not just about the climate.  Of course, we always knew this, but the past five years of Ecological Emergencies and Black Lives Matter have shown starkly that nothing exists in isolation.  We must not devastate nature to achieve our climate solutions, i.e. by taking land from wildlife and devoting it to the capture of carbon.  We must not ignore the injustices of climate change or the potential injustices of our environmental solutions; fossil fuel colonialism must not be replaced by green colonialism just so we can continue exactly as we always have, albeit in electric cars.

Bristol can do this.

Through the Green Capital Partnership but not only the partnership, we have the capacity to connect, cooperate and mobilise.  The Black and Green Ambassadors, for example, have challenged organisations to recognise their lack of racial diversity and inclusion as well as its consequences; and they have supported those organisations to become stronger by addressing those issues. Crucially, although the Ambassadors Programme was successful, we never forgot that it was not about our ego but about community, it was not about promoting itself but rather celebrating the fact that Bristol’s Black community was already active and engaged in environmental issues.  It elevated those groups and challenged other organisations, including my own, to recognise that the lack of engagement from the black community with our initiatives did not mean that they were not leading their own.

Photo of two generations of Black and Green Ambassadors!

I can give so many other examples: Voscur, Ujima Radio, Black 2 Nature, Avon Wildlife Trust, Locality, Babbasa, the Black Southwest Network, the Bristol Zoo, 91 Ways, the Bristol Energy Network, Bristol Ideas, Feeding Bristol…  I am so impressed by what they have accomplished, while being supported by Bristol City Council in concept but largely starved of funds by nearly a decade of austerity.  They have championed projects in a profoundly intersectional manner, decreasing carbon footprints while alleviating fuel poverty, growing food while creating green spaces in marginalised neighbourhoods. What could they achieve with empowerment and a sustainable budget?  What new transport schemes, community energy projects, car or tool sharing, allotments, youth training, community gardens and more could they bring to our city if they were supported with finances and freedom that matched their passion??

As COP26 approaches, I have expectations for our national government, our regional authority, Bristol City Council and the Mayor. But for Bristol as a city, my hope is that its citizens are afforded the opportunity to do what they have always done: argue but also collaborate; innovate and fail but also succeed and create; and then share.

 

Past Climates, Extreme Futures and Communication

Anthropogenic climate change will be devastating.  Devastating.

But I do not think scientists are communicating just how devastating it could be.  Typically, we communicate with an IPCC approach, in which scientists like me provide policy makers and the world our very very best understanding of what is likely to happen. On the other hand, there is a growing group of so-called “doomer messages” in which the worst scenarios are deemed inevitable.

Neither is true.

A few weeks ago, I got this draft for a press release on our paper exploring how Co2 decline caused cooling and growth of the Antarctic ice sheet across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary about 30 million years ago. The news item led with: “Scientists have discovered that a decline in CO2 cooled the Earth’s climate over 30 million years ago. However the Earth’s transition from greenhouse to icehouse could be partially reversed in the next centuries due to the anthropogenic rise in CO2.”

Oh, I thought. The word ‘could’ is doing some damned heavy lifting in that second sentence.

Our future climate forecasting tends to focus on the next 100 years, framed by IPCC, itself framed by timelines thought to be at least somewhat relevant to policy makers and the public.  On those timescales we expect minimal ice sheet melting (about 1 to 1.5 m) even under the most severe global warming scenarios. Moreover, the few studies that have projected the fate of ice sheets beyond 2100 generally show them to be persistent and sea level rise to be modest (2-5 m). There are solid scientific reasons to think this. Ice sheets, once built, are hard to melt, a concept called hysterisis; and ice sheet hysterisis could be particularly strong due to the fact that ice sheets are high (such that temperatures at their surface are lower than they would be at ground level), future projections suggest more snow accumulating at their surface, and the presence of the ice sheet itself cools the region and planet via its high albedo.

But.

They could melt in the coming centuries at very high CO2 levels.

They could.

They could.

At about the same time, I had written a twitter rant that was inspired by the same frustration.

“I’m done fucking about with climate change messaging. Action is going too slowly. Despite heat waves, wildfires, floods and death, our governments are strutting towards #COP26 with proposals that are insultingly incremental.  Not only is this a moral failure in light of what is likely to happen, it is an existential gamble given what *could* happen. The @IPCC_CH  report is imminent and it will outline both likely and extreme possibilities, but the Summary for Policy Makers will emphasise the likely rather than the low probability risks. As scientists, we are doing our best to determine what will likely happen given certain emissions trajectories. But as a communicator, I must become more assertive about what *could* happen. Extreme risks – possible and devastating even if unlikely – must dictate our urgency.

If playing Russian Roulette, you focus on the damned bullet; you don’t ignore it because it is only a 15% probability event.”

It could happen.

It could happen.

Three million years ago, the Earth’s CO2 level was around 400 ppm, levels similar to those of today. And sea level was perhaps 20 m higher, due to significant contraction of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets.

Prior to 35 million years ago, CO2 levels were around 800 ppm, levels that we could attain by the end of this century.  And sea level was about 100 m higher than it is today, in part due to the near complete absence of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Rarely in Earth history have ice sheets been able to persist under the energy balance of a high greenhouse gas world.  And therefore, our continued injection of fossil carbon into the atmosphere will almost certainly bring about the demise of our current ice sheets and cause catastrophic sea level rise. The only question is when.  We think it will happen in a few thousand years.

It could happen in the coming centuries.

It *could* happen.

And of course that is not the only possible consequence of rapid global warming.  In the same twitter thread, I wrote: “As permafrost thaws, much of the released methane will be oxidised to CO2; much of the carbon will be washed to and buried in the Arctic Ocean. But there is a risk that much of it will be mobilised into the atmosphere ramping up warming not just by a little but by a lot. Polar warming could happen faster than forecast. Droughts and famines could be more widespread. Food security could disappear. Reefs are forecast to die at 2C warming, devastating fisheries.”

In the same week, another paper also drew on the geological record of Earth, exploring how the rate of climate change affected extinction rates.  They concluded that: “A temperature increase of 5.2 °C above the pre-industrial level at present rates of increase would likely result in mass extinction comparable to that of the major Phanerozoic events, even without other, non-climatic anthropogenic impacts.”

5.2 °C at present rates is rather unlikely, given trends in the economy, energy production and increasing costs of extracting fossil fuels.  But it could happen.  We could find ways to access other fossil carbon cheaply.  Climate sensitivity could be higher than we think.  Those permafrost and other carbon cycle feedbacks could be larger than we think. 5.2 °C of warming could happen.

We have not internalised these existential risks yet.

Instead, we are acting like global warming is something best to be avoided due to its catastrophic nature and to which we must prepare to adapt – because that is what the likely scenarios suggest.

We are not acting like this is an existential crisis, not necessarily one that will cause humanity to go extinct but one that is damn near that.  A crisis that will be devastating for our society, our civilization and our planet.

And these are not one in a million risks but one in a hundred or one in ten risks. Again, I say: “If playing Russian Roulette, you focus on the damned bullet; you don’t ignore it because it is only a 15% probability event.”

But that is a bad analogy; because with climate change every chamber has a bullet, just some are worse than others.

We are playing Russian Roulette with our planet.

We are playing Russian Roulette with our children.

With a loaded gun.

Our society must put down the fucking gun.

 

Engaging Communities

‘The University always has to have its moment in the spotlight.’ Sarcasm dripped from every word, heard by me even though it was whispered only to his neighbour in the audience. His colleague laughed in reply.  I had just given a talk as part of a Conference on Bristol’s Resilience Strategy, on work we had co-produced.

On another occasion, after speaking about the racial impacts of climate change, a person who’s opinion I valued and still value above nearly all others cornered me and said, ‘If you care so much about racial inequality why is your audience all white? Why are your speakers all white?’

Co-production.  Participatory Approaches. Citizen Science. Co-creation.  Shared learning.  We now recognise that our research – maybe all of it and certainly aspects of it – cannot be conducted in the ivory tower but instead must be done in an engaged, equal and constructive partnership with the relevant communities.  Increasingly, however, the nature of that engagement is critiqued.  Who do we engage and why?  What are the implicit and explicit power imbalances and hierarchies? Even when we engage genuinely, are we still centering our agenda through our soft influence and power?

These are not new questions, but as researchers approach community engagement with new enthusiasm, they are re-discovered by new parts of the academic community and university leadership. The lessons have to be learned again. Our partners have to teach us. Again. And are exploited further.

Twenty years ago, it was thought to be enough to simply be seen to be engaging, so desperate were cities and communities for researchers to listen to them.  But engagement can reproduce the same inequities of the past.  In fact, given the greater emotional and labour investment of the partnership, the potential for exploitation is far greater.

Why must we engage?

I was asked this at a recent workshop, not because anyone there thought it was a contested question but rather to stimulate discussion.  Nonetheless, if we are to collaborate with communities with integrity, it is essential to understand not just why we are obliged to engage as researchers but why we choose to engage as people.

When I first started working more closely with communities – those in Tanzania as part of project to study past climate, with Bristol communities to explore local climate action – I was inspired by the classical reasons.  It is fun; I enjoy working with people.  And it is ethical; people have a right to know where and how their taxes, resources, or history are used and have a right to shape that research.

As I increasingly focused on the intersection of my work on past climate change with local and national strategies for climate action and resilience, my motivation became more pragmatic. If we expect our work to make a difference to society, then people need to have not just understanding but buy-in to that research. Where possible, they should be co-creating those solutions and policies, whether via Citizen Assemblies or involvement in technological innovations.  Too often, scientists, engineers and social scientists have envisioned solutions that have been met with apathy, indifference or even hostility by the citizens they’ve been meant to serve: nuclear power, pesticides and genetically modified crops. Vaccines.  And with communities, flood defences, wind farms, hazard resilience strategies, clean air zones, park restoration.  Co-production will never eliminate controversy, but it mitigates it.  And it certainly helps all of society anticipate challenges and create a more constructive path towards the implementation of solutions.  It will be especially important to implement the very challenging changes required to address the Climate and Ecological Emergencies.

Although I still embrace that pragmatic rationale and approach, it is too simplistic.

First, it is not enough to simply engage the usual, expected or obvious stakeholders.  Instead, we must ask challenging questions about who we are engaging and why, viewed through a decolonial lens and in a manner that challenges the prevailing conventions.  Failure to do so in a society with deeply embedded inequities – locally, nationally and globally – will likely replicate or even amplify the structural racism, sexism and classism of our world.

Take as an example the electric car, a critical part of decarbonising transport.  In the news, in policy, and in engagement by researchers, whose voices are privileged, whose have been centered.  Whose have been marginalised. Which communities do we challenge and which do we placate. I would argue that the entire dialogue centres the current car user – how to make electric cars affordable and comfortable.  How to build the enabling infrastucture.  Where to invest in charging stations.  The dialogue frequently fails to consider the non-car user or the impoverished.  It almost always fails to consider the resources to manufacture those cars:  The countries that still suffer from neocolonial exploitation; the people in those countries; the marginalised groups and indigenous communities in those countries.  Every pledge to invest in electrification of transport is a colonial claim to a finite resource, and yet these issues are almost never discussed in the race to innovate and invest.

The act of engagement is not a neutral one.

Second, we must complicate the personal dimension of the ‘why engage’ question by examining motivations and power inequities.  What are your motivations. Why are you doing this?  Was it necessary to the grant?  Is it necessary for your work to have ‘impact’?  Is it because it is what your employer expects of you in order to achieve the previous?  Engagement is necessary for the success of academics and the University, and therefore, it is always an act of institutional privilege, centering our agenda even when it is co-produced.

This is what sits under the simmering resentment of the anecdote I opened with.  That work was some of my most genuine and heartfelt; it was good work of which I am proud and it did involve multiple communities.  But in that moment, in that forum, I was speaking because I was expected to.  I had a platform not because of the work but because of my employer.  I had long ago understood my white and male privilege, but in that moment I understood my institutional privilege.  Just like I had initially resisted the idea of white privilege because I had suffered as a poor working class kid in rural Ohio, I resisted the idea of institutional privilege because I viewed myself as another proud Union member who loved the University of Bristol but still thought of myself as exploited by the neoliberal University machine as anyone else.

But it is not true.  I had and have the privilege of working for an institution that has nearly a billion pound annual turnover, whose decisions shape our city in profound and long-lasting ways, skewing property values, demographics and investment. I have no doubt that our University, as progressive as it is, brings not only income to Bristol but also inequality. I was leveraging that privilege for a spotlight.  And I would later be able to leverage that spotlight for recognition and promotion.

These complicated power dynamics are not an excuse not to engage, however; they are a lesson about recognising the privilege that is embodied in any interaction with our community.  A counter example is my involvement with the Bristol Festival of Nature.  For over ten years, the University and my research group has attended, bringing an interactive display about how molecular fossils can tell us about past climate and past human history.  It is sort of the most rudimentary form of community engagement. There is no co-creation.  It’s just scientists rocking up and talking to the public and answering their questions.  And no one has ever challenged my role in that or the University’s.

That is because this engagement, although it offers little, offers more than it asks.

Mireia on Twitter: "Paleodetectives ready to uncover the past at @AtBristol #BristolBrightNight @cpe_bristol http://t.co/KoDjvlwCOS"
Megan and Mireia showing the Palaeodetectives at the Bristol Festival of Nature
Deep, meaningful, long-term and honest engagement with communities is not necessarily “better” than rocking up and giving a talk but it is deeper, with greater rewards and also greater obligations.  In any interaction, but especially interactions involving the vast power disparities of Universities with their cities or UK scientists with marginalised communities, it is not enough to fixate only on the most effective mechanism but to understand the privilege we derive from those power differentials, the underlying transactions and the potential for exploitation.
Barriers to Engagement and their Solutions
The Barriers to successful engagement are extensive: finding common cause, a shared language and approach, agreeing mutually beneficial outcomes. There are questions of legitimacy and trust, especially when there has been a history of exploitation. When trust is built, there is the shared frustration of funding, with the options available to all of us limited to months or years, undermining the ability to develop the meaningful relationships to which we aspire.
Prosaically, the solutions are obvious.  Coming from a privileged organisation, can you procure more long-term investment? Given that engagement is part of our jobs, are we willing to transfer some of our academic privilege to our partners by volunteering our time?
But informing and underpinning all of that is the essential need to understand the transactions implicit or explicit in our partnerships.  I don’t want any of us to make our world any more transactional than it already is. But we are obliged to have an understanding of the transactions that are explicit and implicit in our partnerships – for us and our partners – and use that understanding to build a collaboration based on equity, honesty and empathy.
Researchers must be more honest with our partners about what we will get out of it – and sometimes that means being more honest with ourselves. Successful engagement will help us get a PhD. A job. A grant. A paper. A promotion. A pay raise.
Similarly – and in light of history and privilege differentials – we must create the space where our partners can also be honest about their needs, their research priorities, and how they need to have that knowledge returned to them in an actionable way.
And we have an obligation to understand what we are asking of them. Remember this: For a poor person, we can ask for few things more valuable than time. For someone from a marginalised group, we can ask for few things more valuable than their emotional labour, experience and re-lived trauma.
And most of all, understand the source of power imbalances in any interaction. Marginalised groups have power.  Growing up in a working class family, I was acutely aware that we did not have access to much financial, legal or political power; but we had other power that comes from closeness, resilience and lived experience. My community partners would say the same.  The Green and Black Ambassadors are powerful.  Ujima Radio is powerful.  The real question is the intersection of power and privilege.  What power (skills, knowledge, experience) is privileged in society?  And what power do we wield in a civic partnership that arises not from legitimacy but from our institutional and individual privilege.
What I learned about dismantling privilege and building engagement with the Green and Black Ambassadors
In 2015 Bristol was the European Green Capital and it was widely regarded as a successful year.  But it was rightfully critiqued for failing to be inclusive – despite well intentioned efforts to be so. Because of that, I partnered via the Cabot Institute with Ujima Radio, a community radio station, and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership to explore the lack of inclusion during the Green Capital Year and more widely in the environmental movement.  This was the Green and Black Conversation, and through its delivery we learned a lot of things that environmental movement should have known already:
– That the programme was shaped by and favoured the interests of the ‘in-crowd’; its focus and themes, the venues, the types of events all reflected the tastes, interests and convenience of the usual suspects.
– That they were invited to events and even to speak but only after the agenda was set.
– That individuals and groups that represented marginalised groups were being exploited for their time and labour. Moreover, they were not supported in leveraging the Green Capital accolades to win their own funding. It is not the same for the Director of the Cabot Institute for the Environment to sacrifice his day to attend a sustainability workshop than it is for the Director of a racial equity organisation.  Not only are there questions of alignment of responsibilities but also a chasm in resource.   Inviting them to attend was not inclusion.  Expecting them to attend was exploitation.
– That the language was exclusionary.  In particular, language about marginalised groups assumed a lack of interest – ‘How do we get more Black people into nature.’  ‘How can we ensure Black people have access to nature’ – without recognising that they already had their own initiatives and projects. That they had their own sustainability solutions.  That they were engaged just not with the ‘in crowd’s projects.
And so we launched the Green and Black Ambassadors with several goals and values.
– We would always pay our Ambassadors and our partners, compensating them for their labour and experience; and that we would use our privilege to demand the same from all future partners.
– We would invest in a new generation, recognising both the great capacity in Bristol’s African and Caribbean populations but also that this capacity had been undermined by decades of under-investment.
– We would give them a platform to promote initiatives from their own community; and eventually, we would cede our platforms to them.  I would no longer accept the invitations arising from my institutional privilege but pass those invitations to Zakiya and Jazz.
– We would be allies in challenging institutions, including our own. We advocated for their voices in our Board Rooms, classrooms, working parties, One City Plans and more.  We were their voice when they were not present but more importantly, we agreed to open the door and let them come in and have our places instead.
Related image
Roger Griffith and the Inaugural Green and Black Ambassadors, Jasmine Ketibuah-Foley and Zakiya McKenzie
In short, it was a political project to challenge the lack of equity and inclusion in the environmental movement, politics and industry.  And although that might seem far from how you might build engagement into a research proposal, it is not. The principles for all engagement must be the same because all interactions characterised by power differentials are political projects.
But moreso, this type of collaboration enriches and adds value to all of our scholarly endeavours.  Much of the Green and Black Ambassadors Programme was funded by my ERC project on The Greenhouse Earth System.  Centering racial inclusion in the environmental movement might seem rather removed from developing molecular tools to study Earth’s climate 50 million years ago.  Maybe.  But by building trust, relationships and credibility, I have been able to share my research findings with 1000s of people I might not otherwise. The palaeoclimate research was never centred, rarely prominent, usually never mentioned, because that would have undermined the ethos of the Green and Black Programme.  Instead our conversations focused on the air pollution and food poverty issues that our engaged communities had prioritised.
But here is the thing: I’d far rather have my work be a very small part of a large story shared by many than the central part of a small story heard by few. And I think that is a truth of the entire suite of global crises we face.  If we are to address the many environmental and social justice challenges of the future, we must embrace community while rejecting ego.
Addendum.  There is a lot of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in this essay.  Ultimately, we must get away from that.  We must avoid not just the language of we and them but the unconscious view from which that language arises. But I still believe that in the vast majority of partnerships, ‘we’ still need to do better by ‘them’; and pretending we are all in this together, that we all enter into a partnership with equal privilege and capacity is duplicitous.  So my final advice is recognise there is an ‘us’ and ‘them’ arising from differences in privilege, and do everything you can to dismantle that.

Addendum 2: Once you begin to explore power differentials, you unlock a range of challenging questions.  In particular, I find this short article by Farhana Sultana to be illuminating in revealing the power dynamics within the communities we engage.

 

I do not want to talk to you about ‘Population’ and Climate Change

It happens at nearly every talk I’ve given on climate change or the environment.  I could be talking through the lens of my own research on past climate, or via my Cabot Institute role or as a climate action activist. Inevitably and regardless of context, the tedious question is asked, usually posed as a ‘gotcha’ moment, what the questioner considers to be a particularly trenchant insight: ‘But isn’t population the real problem?’

It is the same on social media. Sometimes in the news.  Sometimes said by leaders and environmental advocates who really should know better. It is a pervasive little bore in almost all environmental conversations, intellectually lazy and dishonest, evasive of responsibility.

Of course, often it is far worse than that, coded for racial and colonial bias, an attempt to blame ‘them’ for our environmental problems, ironically ‘them’ that have been most victimised by climate change and environmental degradation in the first place.

In all cases, it reeks of shifting responsibility – either from an individual or a nation, or from a cultural bias or economic worldview. And not shifting that responsibility upwards, to challenge those in power, but shifting down, kicking down, blaming those already exploited and oppressed.

Sometimes it is well intentioned, especially from those new to these debates. And to those of you who want to genuinely bring population control into the environmental discussion in any of its forms, I have one request:  Don’t. I am not interested in this conversation. Few or us are. We know how to do math, we’ve had the conversation many times, and we know it adds nothing new in the way of insight or solutions.

But, if you insist on imposing this conversation on someone, insist on making a documentary where ‘too many humans’ is your central conclusion, insist on coming to talks or coming into our mentions just to ask this question, then here are the rules.

1. Tell us your point.  If your point is to say that ‘more people will consume more’ then move along; we can all do math. We know.

2. If your point is that ‘this is the real problem and it is being ignored’, then go back and redo the math.  Global birth rates have been declining for decades, from a high near 5 in the 1950s to about 2.4 now, i.e. not quite but nearly at stable population levels. That is why population is expected to plateau in the middle of this century. Is this, therefore, the ‘problem that is being ignored’?

2019 revision – world population growth 1700 2100From https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth Note the declining rate of population growth since 1960.

3. If despite this, you still maintain that population is the real problem, i.e. a greater problem than capitalism and consumption, a greater problem than the wealthiest burning through energy and the environment at a rate an order of magnitude greater than the rest of us and two orders greater than the poorest of the world, then acknowledge the inequitable world for which you advocate. Understand global (or even sub-national) per capita differences in consumption, CO2 emissions, etc. Understand how those differences align with privilege and wealth.  And class. And race. Understand who you are blaming, who you are accusing of being the ‘real problem’. And most importantly, understand who you are protecting, who you are insulating from blame, who you are insulating from meaningful action. And therefore:

4. Acknowledge if you just abdicated or deflected from your own responsibility and dumped it onto someone else.  And then we get to explore why you have done so.

If still confused, see below:

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5. Do your homework on the history and wider cultural context of the arguments you are making. Understand eco-facism. Understand its history and the crimes committed in its name. Understand that all of us who have been talking about climate change for decades have had hundreds of speakers come up to us after a talk and say, ‘But we all know that the real problem is population growth in Africa/India/Asia, etc.’  If you are going to talk about population growth, you have an obligation to be aware of the racial subtext – and your own inherent racial biases. You do not have to accept responsibility for your fellow travellers, but you are obliged to know who they are.

6. Put your cards on the damn table. You do not get to suggest something so provocative and laden with racist and imperialist connotations and not have the guts to propose a solution.

7. If the solution is better education of women and alleviation of poverty, then say that instead.  If your solution is to advocate for improved access to birth control, say that instead. We’ve all seen trolls make ominous allusions to population control and then, when challenged, retreat to the respectable conversation of better education and empowerment of women.

8. If your solution is something darker, you don’t get to just vaguely gesture at the problem and allow your audience to fill the gaps.  If you want to control the life choices and bodies of black women, have the guts to say so. If you are a eugenicist, admit it.

9. If you don’t say what your solution is, i get to assume that you are volunteering to be front of the queue if it is implemented.

10. If you are a privileged, white male, just don’t.  If you are past the age of having more children yourself, just fucking don’t.

Seriously.  Re-read point 10.  I’m not saying you do not get to have an opinion; I am a white male who has chosen not to have children and I have opinions.  But I’m not interested in that opinion, especially when it is a conversation about what “other people” need to do in order to solve a problem that people like us created.  What I am interested in is honesty, integrity and personal responsibility.  For any climate or environmental issue, what is your solution and what are the consequences?  Who are you expecting to change or to sacrifice; where does the burden for action fall; to whom are you assigning blame?

And why do you think that?

 

Eradicating Inequity is How We Will Thrive in an Uncertain World

To thrive or even survive in our Uncertain World requires creativity, empowerment and collaboration – but most of all equity. We learned this in developing Bristol’s Resilience Strategy and is strikingly evident now as we grapple with global pandemic.

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In Bristol, a Plesiosaur and other prehistoric creatures cavort on the weathered side of an Edwardian building, the wall flooded with blue, the animals hovering over the traffic-crowded roads.  In the corner of the artwork by Alex Lucas are the words ‘The Uncertain World’ in a font torn from a 60s disaster novel. The prehistoric creatures, from a time when the world was hotter, sea levels higher and the life much different, have been juxtaposed with modern buildings and cars and are meant to be a starting point for conversations about climate change, our past and our future.

It was painted in 2015, when Bristol was the European Green Capital and a focus for dialogue co-curated by the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment, which had long sought to build diverse communities to understand ‘Living with Uncertainty.’

The Uncertain World mural at the University of Bristol, Painted by Alex Lucas and Sponsored by The Cabot Institute for the Environment

An Uncertain World is an apt description for today, as we face not only the long-term chronic uncertainty of climate change and wider environmental degradation but the acute uncertainty of a global pandemic and economic chaos.

But the issues and maybe the solutions – as many have already noted – are remarkably similar.

From Coronavirus we will learn what we are capable of to stop a global disaster. We will rethink what we are capable of achieving – as individuals, businesses, communities and nations.

We can also learn how to live with the challenging uncertainty that will come with even modest climate change.

In 2015, we aspired to use past climate research to create a more reflective consideration of action, resilience and adaptation. Such research explores the climate and life associated with ancient hot climates, potential analogues for our future. Those long-ancient climates contribute to our understanding of an uncertain future by reinforcing what we do know: when CO2 goes up, so does temperature.

It also shows the limitations of our own personal experiences and understanding.  It reveals, for example, that that pCO2 levels have not exceeded 400ppm for ~3 million years; that the current rate of climate change is nearly without precedent; and that ancient rapid warming has dramatic but complex consequences.

In short, it shows us just how unprecedented the world we are creating is.

But perhaps most importantly, it provides for us the otherwise absent personal and societal narratives of climate change.  None of us have experienced this Uncertain World.  Nor has our civilisation. Not even our species. Therefore, the geological past creates a space for considering what unprecedented really means, for considering living with not a statistical uncertainty but a deep uncertainty, an uncertainty that is not informed by our individual, familial, societal or even civilisation experiences.

So perhaps it is not surprising that our conversations entirely predicted the debates we are now having daily about how to address the Covid-19 emergency, and in particular the lack of consensus about how to act when we have no shared experience on which to draw.

Unlike the current passionate debate about pandemic (and climate) action, however, the Uncertain World also allowed us to relocate discussion away from modern divisive politics to the ancient past and unknown futures, thereby creating a place of reflection. Through this, we collaboratively explored what we know or do not about our past and future, renewing motivation for climate action. But perhaps most importantly, by focusing on the uncertainty in the Earth system, we explored the creative forms of resilience that will be required in the coming century (Cabot Institute Report on Living with Environmental Uncertainty.pdf).  And all of this contributed to the creation of Bristol’s Resilience Strategy (Bristol Resilience Strategy-2n5wmn3) and then its One City Plan.

And the findings from those discussions are identical to what we are learning today: equity must be at the centre of any society that hopes to withstand the shocks of uncertainty.

In our conversations, we as a City identified five principles that must shape our resilience. Society must be liveable, agile, sustainable and connected. And most of all, fair.  Although we might choose different words in the fire of a pandemic, the principles are fundamentally the same as those we debate right now. Of course, we aspire to live – and not just to live but to enjoy life and have a high quality of life.  But to do so, we must live and act sustainably and within the means of ourselves, our families, our society and our planet. The Covd-19 crisis is acutely showing what we really value to enjoy life, the differences between what we think we need and what we really need; and in doing so, it is showing us new pathways to sustainability.

To thrive in an uncertain world, we must also be agile. And that means that we must be flexible and creative and have the power to act on those creative impulses and innovative ideas. Some agility can come from centralised government and sometimes it must, such as the decisions to close some businesses and financially support their vulnerable employees; build new hospitals; and repurpose factories to make ventilators. However, the agility that is often the most effective for dealing with the specifics of a crisis arise from our communities and individuals. That requires a benevolent sharing of power – not just political but economic. Communities need the resources to decide how to manage floods and food shortages locally – and the decision-making political power to act on those. Likewise, we need the power and resources to support our vulnerable neighbours during a pandemic, and to support the local businesses and their employees struggling to survive an economic shutdown.

The counterpoint to agility – of an individual, community or nation – is connectivity. We cannot adapt and thrive and survive on our own. The individual who builds a fortress will soon run out of food. Or medicine. Or entertainment. The nation that disconnects from others will find itself in bidding wars for ventilators and vaccines. And perhaps eventually resources and food,

Inevitably though, every single resilience or adaptation or preparedness conversation leads to fairness; to equity and inclusion. The wealthy have power, agency and agility.  The wealthy have the means to build a fortress while remaining connected. The wealthy can stockpile food. They can hire equipment to build flood walls around their estates. They can flee famines and cross borders.

They can flee pandemic.

They can choose how they work. Or whether to work.

They can access virus tests long before the rest of us.

The bitter irony is that we have learned from the Covid-19 crisis what we always knew: that those who are often the least respected, the least paid, the most vulnerable are the most essential.  They are the ones who harvest our food and get it to our stores and homes. They work the front lines of the health services. They are the ones who keep the electricity and water operating. And the internet that allows University Professors to work while self-isolating.

And the poorest in our societies will die because of it.

The same will be true of the looming climate change disaster – but more slowly and likely far worse. It will come first through heat waves that in some parts of the world make it impossible to work; through extreme climate events that devastate especially the most vulnerable infrastructure. And then it will devastate food production and global food supply chains. It will displace millions, at least tens of millions due to (the most optimistic estimates) of sea level rise alone, and then potentially hundreds of millions more due to drought and famine.

Who will suffer?  Those who must labour in the outdoor heat of fields and cities. Those who are already suffering food poverty.  Those who cannot flee across increasingly rigid borders from a rising sea or a famine. Climate change is classist and it is racist. It is genocide by indifference.

And unlike a pandemic, the wealthy cannot simply wait out climate change. They will either succumb to the same crumbling structures as the rest of us; or they will be forced to entrench their power via ever more extreme means. There is a reason why nearly every dystopian story is ultimately a story about class struggle.

But we can address that if we are learn the lessons of today and elevate the values of equity and community that make us stronger together. And if we build societies that embody those values – societies that recognise that prosperity is not a zero sum game. We can horde or we can share food on a world where less is produced.  We can leave everyone to themselves or guarantee people a home and an income. We can put up walls or tear them down.  We can sink boats carrying refugees or we can build them. Coronavirus has exposed the inequities in our society, but it has also shown that we can end them if the desire is great enough. And in that, there is hope.

A resilient world, a strong world, a world that will survive this pandemic and that will survive the coming climate catastrophes must more than anything be an equitable world. There is no reason for it not to be.

The Uncertain World Project – Engagement to build Action

The ERC-funded Greenhouse Earth System (TGRES) explored the climate, ecology and biogeochemical processes associated with ancient hot climates, potential analogues for our future. Ancient climate research contributes to public dialogue by reinforcing our understanding (or lack thereof) of contemporary processes and change. It is particularly powerful because it conveys such knowledge via narratives of past events that complement forecasts for the future (Pancost, Nature Geoscience 2017). Aspects of TGRES research that are critical to understanding our future include: (i) determining that pCO2 levels have not exceeded 400ppm for ~3 million years; (ii) further evidence that the current rate of climate change is nearly without precedent; and (iii) showing that rapid warming has dramatic but complex hydrological and biogeochemical consequences.

The goal of TGRES public engagement was to use past climate change research to curate a space for dialogue, thereby building public ambition for bolder climate action and more creative approaches to resilience.  Central to our engagement strategy was relocating discussion away from the current policy debate to ancient worlds, thereby creating a place of reflection – what we called the Uncertain World.  We collaboratively explored what we know or do not about our past and future, renewing motivation for climate action. Moreover, by focusing on the uncertainty in the Earth system, we explored the creative forms of resilience that will be required in the coming century.

It gained a large platform when Bristol became the European Green Capital, and TGRES PI Pancost became its Scientific Advisor. We co-curated the Uncertain World by writing Bristol 2015’s opening call for action and hosting one of the flagship Summits – a two-day forum with city, national and international stakeholders, informed by public contributions gathered through the year. The Summit’s conclusions were further explored with the public, including via a discussion with the Mayor. We also collaborated on ~30 other events, including contributions to 3 Festivals, 2 other Summits and the Green Capital Arts Program (with Pancost writing its Introduction, co-hosting talks with the Festival of Ideas, co-curating the Fog Bridge Installation, advising on @Bristol’s Blue Marvel movie and co-sponsoring Withdrawn with the National Trust). The Uncertain World’s images of Mesozoic sea animals swimming through the streets of Bristol are now a fixture of Bristol’s street art.

Collectively, these events reached >100,000 people; combined with the final report (Cabot Institute Report on Living with Environmental Uncertainty.pdf), they were a major part of Bristol’s public dialogue in 2015-2016 to build political action. Pancost attended COP21 with Mayor G Ferguson (the official UK City Delegation) and supported his commitment to be carbon neutral by 2050, a pledge repeated by his successor Marvin Rees and then enshrined in the One City Plan (on which Pancost was an official advisor and which was a 2019 finalist for the EU Capital of Innovation). Bristol’s decarbonisation target was accelerated to 2030, when we became the first UK city to declare a Climate Emergency. The Uncertain World was also central to Bristol’s Resilience Strategy (one of the Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities); Pancost was invited to join the Resilience Sounding Board where TGRES research created a space of constructive uncertainty, contributing to the co-creation of shared resilience principles. Perhaps most importantly, the Uncertain World program changed scope to refocus on inclusion and equity in the environmental movement, leading to the Green and Black Conversation and Ambassadors Program.

This is adapted from the ERC report (ERC TGRES Engagement Report – Uncertain World and Green & Black) on engagement as part of the TGRES Project.

 

 

Youth, Extinction and Power; the Present and the Future.

It always starts the same.  Whether by tweet, e-mail or after a talk about climate change.  It is always a young person, always apologetic, almost always anxious.  And then the question comes:

“Are we going to go extinct?”

[Aside from anything else that follows in this blog, the leaders of this world need to understand how horrific their negligence has been that so many young people feel compelled to ask this.]

And my answer is always long and contextual. What actions will we take to check the harm we are doing to our planet? What poorly constrained feedbacks might lurk in the system, and will they amplify or mitigate human action?  How will we respond to the environmental change that we fail to stop?

I don’t know.

What I do know is that neither the collapse of civilisation nor the extinction of humanity nor an uninhabitable Earth is predestined under any future warming scenario.  In the worst warming scenarios, what will happen is that:

Species will go extinct, are already going extinct.

Cultures will go extinct, their lifestyles obliterated by a rapidly changing planet.

Nations will go extinct, buried by rising seas.

But humanity? Even if we fail to limit warming to 1.5C or 2C or even 4C, that hardly means we are doomed.  The Earth is habitable at far higher temperatures, including at temperatures far exceeding any we are likely to achieve due to human activity. It will be devastating and catastrophic.  Rising sea level will lead to inundated cities; food production will be stressed and could collapse; extreme weather events will become even more common, devastating more lives; infrastructure designed for a different world will break or become obsolete; health services will be stressed to their limit by heat waves and infectious diseases but also the mental health challenges of displacement. And all of these will most devastate the poor and vulnerable – globally and in our own countries.  It will be racist, classist, oppressive…. And tens to hundreds of millions could die.

But the magnitude of that crisis, for any future warming scenario, will be dictated less by physics and biology and more by the the all-too-fickle human response to the stress that rapid climate change will impose on civilisation.  It will lead to drought and that could lead to famine, starvation and refugee crises.  Regional conflicts.  War.  Even global war.

All of that – even catastrophic nuclear war – is possible.  But it is not inevitable.

If climate change is an existential threat it is because of our doubts about our own ability to fairly and justly navigate its terrible outcomes.

So why parse this catastrophe?  Why split hairs between the deaths of millions or billions?

Because the “extinction of all us” narrative destroys hope and because it removes the social justice dimensions of this crisis. Extinction is a looming threat, but that threat is far greater for some than for others.  And for many – for indigenous peoples and for the global south and for marginalised groups in all countries – it is not the first existential threat.  And it will not be the last. If we ‘all lives matter’ the climate crisis, there is a great risk that we justify exploitative solutions that replicate the injustices of the current world.  As a geologist, I can assure you that there are versions of a fossil free world that are just as damaging to nature and the environment, just as exploitative of labour and dismissive of human rights, and just as great a threat to human life as the one we live in now.

But as more and more young people have come to me with these questions, I realised that there was a deeper reason to draw this distinction between catastrophe and extinction. The fear of extinction motivates action during this moment of critical urgency – and do not stop demanding that urgency – but it also undermines the power and agency of the youth who are so bravely and assuredly seizing power from the leaders too cowardly to use it themselves.

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Photo of UK University students attending the LCOYUK Conference in Manchester.

This is what I tell the youth striking around the world and who come to me with questions about extinction and the survival of humanity:

Everything you do matters. Climate change is not a binary challenge, in which the world wins or loses.  It is complex and gradational and every achievement that limits warming or environmental degradation should be celebrated.

Every failure matters.  Do not yield the stage or concede the fight or sacrifice urgency.  Because if every action saves lives, every failure to do so costs them.

In short, your power is not conditional on a specific outcome. It thrives in every protest, march and strike; every action taken; every person engaged.

But most importantly, it is you who will be shaping the future, the world of our success or failure.  You will have the power to decide how we respond to the climate change that has occurred.

I imagine a world in 20 to 30 years, where we are sitting together, a world 1.7 C warmer or 2C warmer or 2.6C warmer.  And in all, we will rue what we failed to achieve while acknowledging our success at preventing worse.  But I will be old and retired and you will be leaders of industry and government; and you will the ones with the power to shape that world.  You will decide how to equitably manage food shortages.  You will decide whether to embrace climate refugees or build walls.  You will decide whether it is a just and fair world or nativist and divided one.  You decide if climate change leads to conflict leads to war.  Those are not inevitabilities; they are decisions that will be made by you.

You are seizing power now and using it to demand action and hold governments to account. Hold on to that power and use it for good.  It is not my place to dictate how you use that power; I do not have that right and one might argue that it is my and previous generation’s failure to exercise power for good that has gotten us into this mess.  But I do have four suggestions.

Although symbolic power can reside in individuals, the power that actually delivers change resides in communities.

You are not allowed to ever give up, but you are allowed to rest.

You can be heroes, but you are not saviours.

And most importantly, because many of you come from a position of privilege, you must do what almost all who have come before you have failed to do. You must learn how to share your power.

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Reflections on Climate Emergency Declarations, Climate Nihilism, Action and Inaction

Universities, Businesses, City Councils and Nations are finally – finally – declaring Climate Emergencies.  I have been by many to reflect on these and a few of these are attached.  (Spoiler: We do face an emergency; it is an emergency not just because anthropogenic climate change is catastrophic but also because solving it will be very hard, contentious and take time; and we all have an obligation to act)

 

A Message to the Alumni of the University of Bristol

On the 17th of April, the University of Bristol became the first University in world to declare a Climate Emergency.  It enshrines our institutional obligation to address the climatic, ecological and wider environmental threats posed to our planet and our society.

The University has been at the forefront of exploring and solving these challenges for decades, both through our world-leading research exemplified by the Cabot Institute for the Environment and our education via the Sustainable Futures theme.  Some of our environmentally-focused Schools, including Earth Sciences, Civil Engineering and Geographical Sciences, are ranked amongst the very best in the world. Many of us contribute to the IPCC reports, including the most recent report that highlighted the dire consequences of failing to limit warming to 1.5C.

We must do more. Just like our pledges in 2015 when Bristol was the European Green Capital, the Climate Emergency Declaration recognises that our University’s impact on our city and planet transcends its research and educational mission. We are an employer, a procurer and a consumer; our academics fly across the world and our students fly to us; we consume food, energy, water and minerals.  We are part of the problem and we must be part of the solution.

In particular, the Declaration renewed our commitment to become carbon neutral by 2030.  But what does that mean?  How will we do that?  We know it will be messy and complex, just as our decision to divest from fossil fuels was. Not all fossil fuel companies are the same; in fact, many are critically involved with obtaining the resources needed for a post-fossil fuel electrical future.  Similarly, we must ensure that our own efforts for carbon neutrality do not simply shift the environmental burdens to other countries nor hinder their own development.

We do not have all of those answers yet.

Consequently, I consider the Declaration to be a call for a renewed, self-critical, demanding and collaborative conversation about the future of our University. It is an opportunity for dialogue between all of us – staff, students, alumni, partners and stakeholders across our institution, city and the world.  It will embrace every aspect of our organisation and it will lean on our own world-leading expertise and potential for innovation.

This article]is part of that conversation.  It contains reflections from some of our strongest leaders on this topic but it also serves as an invitation for you to share yours.

 

Article for One Earth

Neither the UK’s Commitment to net zero carbon by 2050 nor the preceding Climate Emergency Declaration represents a significant change in policy – our previous target of an 80% reduction by 2050 already was an implicit stop on a trajectory to net zero, albeit at a later date.

However, they could be critical in changing the underlying narrative around climate change by centering attention on the catastrophic emergency that climate change poses as well as the profound challenge of addressing it.  Both statements declare what has for too long been implicit – the challenge is great, and the need to act is urgent.

I hope that enshrining net zero carbon in law finally forces us to consider policies that go beyond incremental chipping away at emissions. We need a plan for a social, technological and infrastructure transformation that puts us on a path to a decarbonised future.  All of 21st century civilisation was founded on and still is intrinsically based on fossil fuels, the energy they can generate but also the heat and power. To wean ourselves off of this incredibly powerful source of energy, we have to move beyond the easy wins of energy efficiency and a modest increase in renewable energy. We have to decide how we will completely transform our homes and businesses, our transport systems, our food production and our food supply chains.

As a geologist, I particularly recognise the challenge that an electrical society poses in terms of the metal resources we will need.  Electrifying agriculture, transport and heat will require more lithium, neodymium, cobalt and many more metals; it will particularly require more copper.  As such, we need to consider the balance of behaviour change, technological investment and potential environmental trade-offs elsewhere.  I am particularly concerned about green colonialism and the impact of our own renewable revolution on the nations from which we will extract these resources. Of course, tackling climate change also creates opportunities in innovation, creativity and leadership; but it will not be easy and the solutions will be contested.

And that is why this is an emergency.

It is not just because climate change is already causing extreme weather, flooding and heat waves,  and that future climate change will cause even greater harm.  It is because addressing this challenge will be incredibly difficult, and arguably we have not even had the conversations necessary to identify an environmentally and socially just path forward.  We certainly have not had an inclusive conversation that recognises a range of concerns about climate change and putative solutions.

The time for talk should be over, but arguably the real talk has yet to start.

Our political leaders have made some useful political gestures; now they have to agree on actions, ensure their feasibility and legitimacy, and deliver them with the urgency that this unprecedented emergency demands.

 

Reflections on a Tweet – Similarities between climate denialism and climate nihilism.

A lot of us are concerned about the emerging ‘climate doom’ narrative, that climate change beyond X degrees is inevitable or that a given magnitude of global warming could directly cause human extinction.  I share many of the concerns of those anxious about climate change as an existential threat and many seem keen to have an engaged conversation about the likelihood of this happening.  However, for many, their concerns seem based less on evidence and more on a belief system that rejects climate science, expertise and institutions with some similarities to the climate denier community.  And challenging those statements can result in virulent responses. Some thoughts:

“I suppose there are multiple dimensions to my tweet.  The first is that there is little evidence that climate change will lead to human extinction. Life has thrived on far warmer worlds.  And although the rate of climate change now is profoundly worrying, extinction at even elevated degrees of warming seems unlikely.  Many species and ecosystems will likely go extinct, and our civilisation might be profoundly transformed, but that is different than ‘human extinction’, a ‘barren planet’, an ‘unihabitable Earth’. When probed, many argue that climate change will cause extinction through a cascade of conflicts and ultimately nuclear war; I certainly worry about that, but that is a very different message with very different assumptions than ‘we will all go extinct if we do not limit warming to 2C’.

Second, when scientists try to clarify this, climate nihilists often use the same language, rhetoric and arguments to dismiss climate scientists as denialists.  Both claim that IPCC is a ‘UN report’ and therefore a political rather than scientific document (it IS a scientific report and it is written and peer reviewed by scientists).  Doomists talk about an overly cautious scientific community, whereas denialists talk about an overly alarmist one.  Both, when confronted, can resort to links to blogs, non-experts and ad hominem attacks.  And anecdotally, both can be misogynistic (women scientists always get nastier replies).  So at its heart, I think both groups are embracing a belief system that inherently mistrusts experts, institutions and knowledge, and that concerns me.

Many are arguing about the psychological impact of this – do those worrying about a true climate apocalypse and global extinction create such despair as to cause inaction??  I cannot say.  Renee Lertzmann has been exploring a lot of the psychology of climate despair.   But I think it is certainly fair to say that our past efforts to mobilise meaningful action have failed, so I am not going to critique these tactics.

Instead, my main concern is that climate change will affect all of us but it will MOST affect the poor and vulnerable, those from the global south and marginalised groups in the UK.  The language of extinction can impose an ‘All lives matter’ narrative on a movement that must centre social justice. But you do not have to look hard to see many using the extinction framing to argue that other issues (indigenous rights, social justice) are secondary. Social media abounds with rebuttals like: ‘you cannot have social justice on a lifeless planet.’

Having said all of that, there is a critical need to have a wider conversation that includes the very low probability but very high risk outcomes of climate change. Some of these catastrophes could happen.  But there is a huge amount of difference between those arguing that this could happen and those claiming that it will happen.”