The net zero transition requires a human transition
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At COP28 in Dubai the delegates made significant progress on important issues such as the loss and damage fund and plans to tackle agricultural emissions. And, of course, the first-ever agreement to move away from fossil fuels is an important landmark in the battle against climate change.??
Yet I’m keenly aware that we have fewer than 300 working days left to 2025 – the year by which science tells us that our greenhouse gas emissions must start to decline sharply if we want to reach net zero by 2050.?
The COP delegates focused on process and policy around the transitions the world must make in energy, materials and food—crucial elements of achieving our climate targets. But I worry that we are ignoring that reaching net zero also requires a human transition. What I mean is that if we are going to limit global warming to 1.5°C, it will depend heavily on the desires, values, attitudes and actions of the more than 8 billion of us who share this planet.??
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Rethinking sustainability?
Almost everyone wants to live more sustainably, but organisations have done a poor job of motivating people to make meaningful changes and sustainable choices.??
To help effect the human transition, we need to look at sustainability more broadly, to encompass how people intuitively think about their own lives and the impact they have on people and the planet.??
The rising cost of living, geopolitical instability, and how the very word “sustainability” can trigger strong and heavily politicised reactions make a broader, more human perspective essential.??
People identify more with the concept of living sustainably than with the word itself, revealing an opportunity to broaden what it means to act sustainably. We need to move beyond focusing on narrow ideas about the environment, or economics, or even the current definition of sustainability.?
Sustainability, of course, includes concepts such as recycling, electric vehicles and climate change. But if we want to encourage people to change their behaviour, it’s far more effective to define sustainability as creating an equitable present and future in which people can thrive on a thriving planet. ?
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Piecing together the puzzle?
In the run-up to COP28, Accenture published three complementary reports that look at how we can make progress toward net zero at different levels, including motivating individuals.??
Destination net zero focuses on enterprises: the world’s largest 2,000 companies by revenue. It shows that just over one-third of these companies have full net zero targets, and only 18% are on track to reach their targets. To help accelerate their progress towards net zero, the report outlines steps that individual businesses can take by combining up to 20 different decarbonisation best practices.?
Of course, companies acting alone won’t solve the problem—change is required at a higher level as well. Powered for change, looks at the ecosystem changes that need to accelerate the decarbonisation of hard-to-abate heavy industries such as steel, mining and metals, cement, chemicals and freight and logistics. They must change the economics of net zero by unblocking key choke points through strategic, data-led collaboration with energy suppliers and customers.??
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The other crucial piece of the puzzle, as I’ve already said, is the human factor. We delve into that in Our Human Moment: Cracking the code. In it, we look at how people view the world and their role in it, and what this means for how they relate to sustainability. It shows how organisations can help people live more sustainably to reinvent consumption and themselves for the better.??
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Cracking the code?
This new approach goes beyond sustainable products and services or revised communications. It helps to create an environment in which people and organisations can communicate and relate in new ways, whether between customers and vendors, employees and employers or among businesses. Ideas about growth, disruption, competition and resource extraction are shifting. And organisations’ business and revenue models, objectives and key performance indicators, and reward and remuneration schemes are evolving too.???
Amidst the change, people have different ideas about what’s needed and it’s not easy to align everyone behind the effort. By making sustainability more human—more hospitable than political and more familiar than distant—we can respond to these differing perspectives. In doing so, we can dissolve the relevancy gap separating organisations from people.? ?
Six life-centric archetypes—each with their own view of the world and relationship to sustainable living—show people’s different starting points toward sustainable living and shed light on how to best motivate them to make sustainable choices:??
Attempts to make people more sustainable by focusing on sustainability alone haven’t worked. Instead, we need to find a way to engage everyone, where they are today, no matter if they think sustainability is relevant or irrelevant, easy or difficult. This is where using these archetypes can help—by providing compelling ways of making sustainability relevant to people’s lives.??
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Our human moment?
Tackling climate change and the broad swath of sustainability issues the world faces represents the biggest challenge that humankind has ever faced. The cooperative effort, needed on a massive scale, will of course require exactly the kind of focus on process and policy that the COP’s delegates demonstrated.??
But the kind and scale of change that we need to reach net zero will require more than the agreement of 200 national governments or thousands of businesses and NGOs. It will require the combined efforts of 8 billion people—as they take part in the human transition needed to reach net zero. That will require we all take a new, life-centric approach that stops trying to make humans more sustainable and starts trying to make sustainability more human.??
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Mark Curtis?
Global Sustainability and Thought Leadership Lead – Accenture Song?
Love this Mark. Were these archetypes based on any kind of attitudinal data? I wonder how they relate to a non-Northern Western hemisphere life. This has got me thinking about a life-centric approach to systems mapping (with more than a smidge of behavioural design thrown in). I'd love a way to collectively pause and reflect on what changes are needed with 8bn people in the way that COVID lockdowns unlocked many different experiences (that short sharp shock) like seeing pollution visibly reduce, how we interacted with others etc. I hope that moment doesn't come become of lack of accelerated action.