My grandfather grew up in the northwest of England, surrounded by over 1,000 coal mines within just five miles of his hometown of Wigan. And today I’m speaking to you from the site of another former mine, this time a China clay mine at the Eden Project in southwest England.
For generations, my grandfather’s ancestors were coal miners, and it would have been only natural for him to follow in their footsteps. But he didn't want to go down the mine. He chose a different path and got a scholarship to study mathematics. And years later, I followed him into mathematics, where I discovered a real love of patterns and of figuring out the underlying rules that generate them. And later, when I went to work in industry, I realized that every human system and every natural system can be thought of as a set of repeating patterns.
For example, take the energy system. We can still trace the patterns of our reliance on fossil fuels all the way back to the early 1700s, when we started to really use all that coal. And to tackle climate change, we’re going to have to move towards new patterns that are based on clean power.
When I wasn’t exploring patterns, I was developing a love of wild places, particularly cold, wild places like Greenland, Iceland and Patagonia. And it was there that I first came face-to-face with the physical impact of climate change. In 1987, I was supposed to be working at the end of a glacier in east Greenland. And when we got to where it was shown on the map, there was no ice there. It had retreated by over 15 kilometers since the map had been surveyed. Something was changing the patterns.
Now I find myself in the role of the United Nations Climate Action Champion, working with an amazing network of partners to change the patterns of the global economy to tackle the climate crisis. Our mission is to help drive the transition to the zero-carbon future, to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Well, tackling the climate crisis can be really overwhelming, especially if you try and look at it through the lenses of politics or economics. It’s a huge, complex problem, it’s very hard to get your head around it. But I find that there’s a different lens that can make it much easier to grapple with and even lead to optimism. It’s the lens of systems which I define simply as the science of patterns and their underlying rules.
But what do I mean by a system? I think of a system as a set of interconnected relationships which lead to a repeatable and recognizable pattern. So to give you an example, let’s think of the global maritime shipping industry. It’s huge. It's responsible for transporting over 80 percent of global trade and it produces similar emissions to the entire country of Germany. And this system consists of the interconnected relationships along the value chain between shipping manufacturers, fuel manufacturers, ports, the shipping operators and the cargo owners and those influences around it, the policymakers, the financiers, technology providers and civil society. That’s what I mean by a system. And our job is to drive the transformation in every global system, from agriculture to retail, from shipping to trucking, from cement to steel, so that collectively we move towards a zero-carbon future.
So the question is, what are the underlying rules that we need to apply to lead to new zero-carbon patterns in the economy? Well, we’ve come up with three simple rules of radical collaboration that, if acted on by all actors in each system, will lead us to the zero-carbon future.
Rule one is to harness ambition loops, which are simply feedback loops driving ever-higher levels of ambition. For example, when businesses commit to zero carbon and start investing and innovating, they embolden policymakers. And when policymakers set the regulatory framework to drive towards zero carbon, they incentivize the private sector to innovate. That’s an ambition loop, and every relationship within each system is an opportunity to drive an ambition loop towards new zero-carbon patterns in the system.
Rule two is to set exponential goals. We know from history that every major industrial disruption has followed the same shape, an exponential curve, with new technologies being adopted very slowly at first, but then a doubling rate kicking in consistently, until the overall transformation happens very quickly in the end. It’s a movie we’ve seen many times before, whether from horses to cars, from valves to transistors or landlines to mobile phones. And we understand how it works. Initially, the cost of technology is high, but as we learn through volume adoption, the cost goes down and adoption goes up. Best example right now would be electric batteries consistently coming down in cost by 20 percent a year for the last 10 years. And as the volume of adoption grows, especially with electric vehicle sales growing, we can be confident that the costs of that technology will continue to go down, driving that exponential growth. We set these exponential goals because we believe in the power of human innovation. Engineers love these goals, these stretch targets, it’s what they live for.
The third rule is to follow shared action pathways. And these are maps of the actions which every action in the system has to take in the short term to make sure we’re on track to that exponential goal. Actions that, if everyone in the system follows, means that we’ll be on track to the zero-carbon future. We normally set these for a relatively short period of time for the next five years, and then we’ll review and set the next phase of the journey.
By following these three simple rules of radical collaboration, we can drive the race to zero emissions. And my team now, with hundreds of partners, have created a toolkit for these three goals for every sector of the global economy. They’ve mapped the interconnected ambition loops, they plotted exponential goals, and they’ve published shared pathways.
Now, I said earlier on, that adopting a systems lens can help us to be more optimistic, and I’m very optimistic. So let’s try to explain why by looking at the application of those three rules to the shipping system that we looked at earlier. First of all, we just remind ourselves of all of those interconnected ambition loops that we’re going to be harnessing. Second of all, we set our exponential goal. We’re at zero now, and we’ve got to get to 100 percent of all ships being zero-carbon by 2050. When we plot the exponential curve, we see that we need to get to five percent by 2030. Now, that may not seem like much, but starting from zero, that’s a big change, and it will drive the learning which drives down the cost, which means that in the ’30s we can really accelerate and finish the job in the ’40s.
So how are we doing against the shared action pathway, which is the next of our tools? Well, it turns out we’re doing pretty well, actually. The biggest container shipping company in the world, Maersk, has already committed to buying its first zero-carbon vessel in 2023. German utility Juniper has abandoned plans to invest in gas infrastructure in the port of Wilhelmshaven and is instead investing in green amonia infrastructure. Customers are coming together to form a cargo owners zero-emission vessels initiative, sending a demand signal to container operators. And policymakers are shifting too, the EU is extending its emissions trading scheme to cover shipping emissions, which will put a price on carbon and incentivize investments in green fuel infrastructure. Technology companies are coming together. Seven of them have formed the Green Hydrogen Catapult to drive the cost of green hydrogen down to below two dollars a kilogram in the next five years, crucial action on that pathway towards commercial viability for zero-carbon vessels. And civil society is influencing the system as well. In the Netherlands, over 10,000 citizens have taken shipping fuel manufacturer Shell to court, and the court has found that Shell must reduce its emissions much more ambitiously, by 45 percent by 2030.
So you can see that we now have radical collaboration in the shipping system, driving progress towards that exponential goal. And that's just one system in the world economy. So the great news today is that now thousands of countries and companies, of cities and investors, of states and civil-society organizations are all implementing these three simple rules of radical collaboration and converging actions towards exponential goals. They’re not fully aligned yet, of course, but the more we converge, the lower the risk, the lower the costs and the faster that we can go. And so what might have seemed a real stretch or even impossible just a few years ago, seems eminently achievable now.
My favorite example of this phenomenon is the transition to electric vehicles. In 2016, the world’s leading forecasters of the energy system were telling us that we’ll still be buying combustion engine cars in the 2080s. Five years later, in 2021, the vehicle manufacturers of the world and the policymakers of the world are converging on the exponential goal of 100 percent zero-emission vehicles, the end of the combustion engine in the mid-2030s. In just five years, the future’s come forward by five decades.
Now, as I said, this task of tackling the climate crisis and driving this transition can be really daunting. But as always, we can turn to nature for inspiration on how following a few simple rules can lead to beautiful new patterns. Take a look at the stunning shapes that these flocks of starlings are forming in the sky, by following their own three simple rules of radical flocking. Rule one, pay attention to each other and don’t get too close, rule two, fly in the same general direction, and rule three, don’t fly too far away from each other. Pretty close to our own three simple rules of radical collaboration: One, harness ambition loops, two, pursue exponential goals, three, follow shared action pathways. Now, I want to finish by reflecting on one final and crucial ambition loop, one that enables all of the others. This is the feedback loop between the stories that we tell of the path to the future and the future that we create and the actions that we take today. We humans are storytellers, we're born storytellers, we tell stories to each other all the time. These stories of the future are our ambition loop. So if we tell stories full of fear and failure, then we will dispirit and disempower each other, We’ll derail our collective efforts to build a better future. But when we tell positive stories, we tap into the very best of the human spirit, we inspire collaboration and innovation. So it’s crucial that we pay real attention to the stories that we’re sharing about our pathway on the race to zero. We have to make sure we seek out and select positive examples of change along those pathways to the exponential goals and share them widely. That’s how we build the most important and powerful ambition loop of all. Because the stories that we tell the most often are the ones that will come true.
Thank you.
