Putting People at the Heart of our journey to Net Zero

The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record, helping trigger devastating wildfires from Hawaii to Canada and Rhodes, and flooding from Libya and Greece to China, killing 1000s of people and impacting the lives of millions more.

Yet despite the harrowing images that have dominated the media, a new wave of uncertainty seems to pervade many parts of politics, society, and the corporate world on the climate crisis. Should we act? And if we should, what should we do? Some of the hard-won confidence and clarity that flowed from COP26 in Glasgow just two years ago seems to have dissipated.

And that’s not surprising. The Pandemic, conflict in Ukraine, rising inflation and interest rates and a cost-of-living crisis have all sapped the financial and emotional reserves we need to transform rapidly from a high carbon to low carbon society and supporting economy.

But there’s another factor at play too. For the past two decades much of the debate, negotiations and indeed action on the climate crisis has been played out on the periphery of people’s lives.

A whole litany of confusing acronyms and terms – COP, IPCC, Net Zero, carbon neutral, Science Based Targets etc – have emerged, creating the perception that citizens should just ‘leave it to the experts’.

Even in the one substantive area of success in reducing emissions – decarbonizing power grids– it’s rarely felt tangible to people. Electrons, albeit greener ones, have kept on flowing into people’s lives, powering their homes and devices, the shops and restaurants they visit. They have not needed to take personal action.

In fact, some cities across the world have been designed to be very much smarter and greener, but even here positives changes are largely invisible to people as they go about their everyday lives.

The result is that for many people, the climate crisis, its impact and tackling it, has been played out at the ‘edge of their vision’, fleeting moments of engagement before they return to their busy lives.

Perhaps there’s been a complicit pact between ‘rulers and ruled’ – ‘leave it to us, the experts’; ‘happy to, sounds very complicated.’

Yet this pact was never going to be sustainable. To achieve what needs to be achieved requires massive collaboration across all parts of Society. It can’t be solved by experts or governments alone.

There was always going to be a point when the very scale of change needed to create a Net Zero future, quickly, would start to impinge substantially on people’s lives. A need to insulate millions of homes; the shift from internal combustion engines to EVs, cycling and public transport; the creation of low emission zones in cities; the move from air to rail travel where possible; replacing gas boilers with heat pumps; changing diets; asking farmers to alter practices passed down through the generations. These shifts in personal behaviour have the potential to cut emissions by billions of tonnes of CO2 but we will not realize them unless people understand the imperative for change and have confidence that new low carbon solutions deliver the performance and experience they are used to, cost effectively.

So even though the images of wild, extreme weather have never been in sharper relief, it’s still been easy for those who actively resist the shift to a Net Zero future, to pick at these threads of uncertainty and create unease, even resistance to change across Society.

Politicians and corporate leaders will have to get far closer to citizens’ daily lives and make it easier for them to adopt a low carbon lifestyle. Not through one-off speeches and periodic, sermon-like ‘public information’ campaigns, but through a systemic, deep understanding of people’s motivations and concerns, helping them match this to the practical, cost effective, easy-to-use solutions that can help them play their part in the shift to Net Zero.

For many people, change needs to be positioned on a local, here and now level, not a global, far in the future one. This is why creating smart neighbourhoods within smart cities is so important. People can see low carbon change being normalized by family, friends, neighbours, schools, sports clubs and businesses. The cost of change kept down by collective action.

This is why we have launched this Blog Series to look at what Panasonic is doing with its ‘Green Impact’ programme and the Smart Cities it is helping to create. For example, energy saving and more circular economy consumer products; battery storage, which buffers and stores renewable energy in homes and cars, heat pumps and EV charging component technologies - not just as standalone solutions but integrated at a whole home and even community level.

All underpinned by its commitment to decarbonize its own Scope 1 and 2 operational carbon footprint as well as its Scope 3 value chain emissions.

In this blog series we’ll explore what Panasonic is doing to speed up and scale up the adoption of these everyday low carbon solutions. We will also look at what they’ve learnt along the way so others too can start their journey towards greener living. #Panasonic Partner