Nature’s rebound is one of the upsides of the otherwise calamitous Covid-19 crisis. Atmosphere and waters cleared, the land quietened, and birds, fish and animals returned. When we took our foot off the neck of nature, she responded with renewed vigour and resilience. But we gave nature only a temporary reprieve while lockdown lasted.

Photo: Liam Philp

Speed is another surprise about the virus, in ways frightening and uplifting. It is spreading with astonishing speed through the human population. Harmless to the bats it came from, it is deadly to some people it attacks. Yet, people have responded fast, individually and collectively, magnificently and abysmally. One way or another, humankind is getting through this crisis.

We could choose to ignore these lessons of nature and speed. We could carry on the way we were before the virus struck. If so, nature would respond ever faster to the destructive pressure we humans put on it. Climate catastrophe, species extinction, ecosystem destruction and degradation of air, water and soil would all accelerate with frightening speed. With every species we eliminate, we break one more thread in the web of life.

Or we could choose to apply these lessons to our relationship with the planet. If we did, we would help nature restore the living systems on which human life utterly depends. We could make our towns and cities healthier and more productive, in terms human and natural. Ways to do so include travelling less by relying more on virtual communications and walking, cycling and public transport; by restoring our urban rivers and coastal waters; and by bringing more of nature back into our urban environments to help us feed ourselves and restore our urban ecosystems.

Photo from Auckland University – A working bee at the UOA bee sanctuary.

Beyond our towns and cities, we could help nature rebuild its diversity and vitality, resilience and fecundity in all of Aotearoa’s land, waters, atmosphere and oceans. Ways to do so include eradicating predators from our native bush; helping threatened species recover; making infrastructure compatible with natural environments; ensuring tourism and other human activity don’t degrade pristine places; and using natural resources in ways that help renew and regenerate the ecosystems which provide them to us.

An inexorable logic runs through these great ambitions. We must learn how to work with nature, not against it. In all we do.

One expression of this is the regenerative economy. This is a radical change from the exploitive economy which has driven human progress through the two centuries of industrialisation to date. The bankruptcy of the exploitive economy is abundantly clear. One measure of its ecological failure is our breaching of some of the nine planetary boundaries defined by Earth systems science. One measure of its economic and social failure is the UN’s Human Development Report.  Of all the enormous challenges of creating a regenerative economy, the greatest is learning regenerative ways to use land to grow food. Yet, doing so will have multiple benefits to the planet and people. It is the bedrock on which we can build sustainable human societies.

Photo: Camilla Rutherford @camillarutherford_photography

For the past century or so, the industrialisation of food production has had its triumphs. It has made much more food available to far more people at prices ever more affordable for many of them. But such farming systems are the greatest human drivers of changes in land use, in ecosystem degradation and species extinction. Cumulatively, they are the greatest single cause of climate change, which only compounds and accelerates the other problems they create. Moreover, some industrialised food consists of “empty calories,” those which provide energy but little or no other nutrition. Consequently, there are now more obese people (from a number of causes, not just nutrition) in the world than malnourished. This is causing a health crisis. “Overweight and obesity are linked to more deaths worldwide than underweight. Globally there are more people who are obese than underweight – this occurs in every region except parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia,” the World Health Organisation reported recently. 

The twin goals of healthy people and a healthy planet are inextricably linked. But we can’t achieve them by incremental improvements in existing systems. They are too broken, their damage is too great and our time too short. 

Only radical, fast reinvention informed by nature itself will work.

A wealth of investigations, initiatives and organisations have embraced this essential truth in recent years. They range from long-established bodies such as the World Economic Forum and The Commonwealth, to new alliances such as the Food and Land Use Coalition, which published a report last September entitled Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use. One of the best guides to how we can feed a healthy diet to 10 billion people (the likely human population by 2050, up from 7.8 bn now) within the planetary boundaries is the work of the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health. This joint venture between a Scandinavian NGO and a British medical journal published its definitive report early last year. Its starting point was to establish healthy reference diets, then to work out how much the shift to them would reduce the environmental impact of current food and farming systems. “Transformation to healthy diets by 2050 will require substantial dietary shifts, including a greater than 50 percent reduction in global consumption of unhealthy foods, such as red meat and sugar, and a greater than 100 percent increase in consumption of healthy foods, such as nuts, fruits, vegetables, and legumes.”

The report’s data, analysis and graphics are compelling. For example, red meat consumption in North America is five times the recommended healthy intake per person; in Europe and central Asia it is three times. Dairy consumption in those three regions is only moderately above the recommended intake. But the adverse environmental impacts of dairy production per serving are similar to red meat so they share the same transformational challenge.

In addition to changes in diet, new forms of food will play a crucial role too. Two alternatives to red meat and dairy products, for example, are substitutes made from plants or grown from stem cells. Both have significantly reduced environmental impact compared with the farmed versions, as do plants grown aeroponically and in other forms of indoor horticulture. 

Photo: Mark Anderson

Here in New Zealand, our red meat and dairy sectors argue they have two advantages over their farming competitors abroad: they are more efficient, and their pasture-based systems have lower environmental impacts compared with feedlot farmers overseas. Thus, they believe they will always have plenty of consumers overseas who are willing to pay high prices for their high-quality products.

But that’s as logical as if Volkswagen said it will always have plenty of customers for its high quality, reliable, safe and relatively low emission fossil fuel cars. Quite the contrary. It is designing its last range of fossil fuel engines it will ever make. They will go into production in 2026 to tide it over until electric, hydrogen and other zero-emission technologies are ubiquitous. Along the way, Volkswagen’s customers are gaining substantial economic and environmental benefits.

Our farmers need to make a similar transition. Yes, they will keep producing quality meat and milk, just as Volkswagen will keep making cars. But how can they transform their science and practices to turn their farms from sources of greenhouse gas emissions into carbon sinks? This would help turn their farming from an extractive system to a regenerative one. And with zero nutrient losses due to the improved soil filtration of more diverse pastures with longer roots, their farms would be more productive and environmentally sustainable.

Photo: Mark Anderson

Transitioning rapidly to regenerative systems, our farmers would build ecological and economic resilience and establish this new competitive advantage, even over such farmers overseas. Our farmers will have a deeply compelling story to tell about their pivotal role in restoring Aotearoa’s unique ecosystems and species, and in encouraging urban Kiwis to bring true regeneration to their built environments and economic activity.

By helping nature rebuild the ecosystems on which their farming utterly depends, they will be agents of positive change. Doing so, they will build far closer relationships with their customers at home and abroad, and with their fellow Kiwis who would applaud and support such a transformation.

Photo: Mark Anderson

A growing number of Kiwi farmers are already on the journey, as Pure Advantage and the Edmund Hillary Fellowship explore in their newly launched initiative Our Regenerative Future. This column is part of that series of articles laying out principles, practices and case studies of regenerative agriculture in New Zealand. Alina Siegfried is the lead author of the series, edited by Simon Millar at Pure Advantage and I’m an EHF Fellow.

This is absolutely the right time for us to begin to regenerate. The virus crisis is forcing us all to think and act better and rewarding us for doing so. Nature is showing us the way.

This story is part of a series called ‘Our Regenerative Future’ produced in collaboration with Edmund Hillary Fellowship which investigates the current state of regenerative agriculture in New Zealand, and highlights future opportunities for the country’s primary production sector.

Back To Our Regenerative Future

Rod Oram

The post Informing the Future with Regenerative Agriculture appeared first on Pure Advantage.

It harkens back to the local sector’s glory days in the early 2000s when oil and gas production peaked and money for more exploration was ramping up.

It takes no account of how dramatically the global oil and gas sector has changed since then. Fracking has created an over-abundance of ultra-cheap gas and plenty of fairly cheap oil. We simply can’t compete because of our tiny scale, long distance from the great oil and gas fields of the world and high cost of deep-water exploration and development.

That’s why multinational oil and gas majors have walked away from New Zealand. Their exploration spend here collapsed from $300m in 2010 to $10m in 2015. We have one of the most attractive exploration and royalty regimes in Asia Pacific, but even that didn’t help stem the exodus.

Notably, Shell, the fourth-largest gas producer in the world, has quit New Zealand after selling its last gas assets here at a much lower price than it had hoped for. It says it is focusing on finding mega fields on and offshore in, or close to, existing production provinces of the world, thus ending its 100-year involvement here.

Our gas production dropped 22 percent from its all-time high in 2001 of 6.3 bn m³ to 4.9 bn m³ in 2017. Over the same period global gas output increased by 30 percent to 3,768 bn m³ . Our global market share halved to 0.13 percent.

Our oil production is even less significant – 40,000 barrels a day, a mere 0.04 per cent of global production of 100m barrels a day.

Petroleum Exploration and Production Association of New Zealand, which funded the report by NZIER, always offers many reasons why it is so bullish about NZ’s oil and gas growth potential. But none of the reasons stand up to scrutiny, as I laid out in this column ‘Shedding light on the gas sector’s claims’ last April.

And the future only gets vastly more challenging for oil and gas producers, not just minuscule ones like us. The technology of renewable energy is accelerating fast, and its costs of production are plummeting. Moreover, oil, gas and coal companies already have far more proven reserves than could ever be burnt if we are to avoid runaway climate change.

For the modelling in its report, NZIER simply took the three production scenarios used by the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment last year when it produced its Regulatory Impact Statement on the government’s ban on issuing further licences outside Taranaki.

The low production scenario is based on a low global oil price and high carbon price (as a proxy for strong global climate change policy); the medium scenario has a medium oil price and medium carbon price; and the high scenario a high oil price and a low carbon price.

But the RIS itself, issued last September, offers zero evidence of how it derived those scenarios. Crucially, it gives no hint of how it assessed climate and technology change.

Worse, the RIS uses the MBIE Oil and Gas Model which was designed to estimate gas supply for various electricity generation scenarios. It is a mechanistic financial and simulation model devoid of inputs about changing technology or climate policy.

Through the entire RIS the word “global” gets not a single mention. Nor is there any reference to reputable international analysis on the future of oil and gas from the likes of the International Energy Agency, which is part of the OECD.

NZIER then generated its report by running those three highly questionable scenarios through its Computable General Equilibrium model of the New Zealand economy. CGE models are based on massive databases on an economy, and the relationships between the myriad factors within them. They are good at showing how a shock, in this case a sharp drop in oil and gas exploration and production, ripples out through the economy.

But CGE models can deal only with Business As Usual. They can’t model

how economies shift markedly thanks to changes to the likes of competition, innovation, policies and societal values.

NZIER acknowledges how limited its report is. Laurence Kubiak, its chief executive, said it took the RIS scenarios as given without examining them, and its CGE model is only “sizing the hole” that would be created if there were a sharp drop in oil and gas exploration and production. “We haven’t taken any decision on what might fill that hole.”

NZIER does have what it calls an “NZ Green” component to its model which it designed to help analyse climate policy here. But it didn’t use it because it would have predicted that the government’s permit decision would have only a tiny impact on emissions here or globally. No surprise, since we only produce 0.04 percent of the world’s oil and 0.13 per cent of the world’s gas.

Thus, the NZIER report says between now and 2050 the people of Taranaki will suffer a huge hole in their economy, and the people of New Zealand a pretty big hole in theirs. Yet there was good news for some people. By missing out on this supposed oil, gas and investment bonanza our exchange rate will drop which will benefit farmers and other exporters. But even that silver cloud had a dark lining – the likes of imported tractors would cost more.

These, though, are not real outcomes. They assume the people of Taranaki are incapable of developing economic activity to supplant oil and gas and grow beyond it. Wore, they are status quo modelling results based on heroic assumptions about a return of the long gone golden days of exploration here.

Yet, the fact it’s hard to find oil and gas beyond onshore Taranaki is laid bare on page 51 of the RIS. The estimated failure rate of exploration wells is 60 per cent onshore Taranaki, and ranges from 80 percent for offshore Taranaki to 90 percent in all other exploration areas in the country onshore and offshore.

Conversely, we can expect exploration and production to rise onshore Taranaki over the coming decades because of its proven geology, its ability to meet increased domestic demand and the continuing issue of permits.

Instead of economists dishing out useless analysis like NZIER’s that sees the future as a continuation of the past, they would start to earn their keep if they learnt the new methodologies out there that help us make robust decisions about a very different future.

Let’s start with an alternative, positive scenario: NZ makes real progress on climate change and sustainability over the next few decades, so our reputation is enhanced, we attract more capital, our exporters earn a higher premium on their products, our exchange rate rises, the cost of our imports falls, as do our costs of cleaning up our environmental degradation. Now, that’s progress.

But this report funded by the oil and gas sector and produced by NZIER offers none of that. It is simply a failed attempt by an incumbent industry to protect its vested interests.

The report, though, has one merit. It reminds us that Past as Future (PAF) is even worse than Business as Usual (BAU), which itself is bad enough, as my column last week explored.

Thus the executive summary of the NZIER / PEPANZ report, which I offer in its entirety below, is worth printing out and hanging on your wall. It is the self-agrandising last will and testament of a sunset industry:

The New Zealand Government’s decision to ban new oil and gas exploration permits will see a series of strongly negative impacts ripple through the economy. The decision prevents the granting of new exploration permits outside of onshore Taranaki and was given effect through the Crown Minerals (Petroleum) Amendment Act 2018. This report refers to this policy in shorthand as “the ban”.

NZIER has calculated the macroeconomic impacts of this ban at both the national and regional levels:

• The ban will be felt most keenly in the Taranaki region, but even at the national level the ban will reduce real gross domestic product (GDP) by between $15 billion (3%) and $38 billion (7.4%). The medium scenario is a reduction of $28 billion (5.4%).

• Household consumption (the best measure of economic wellbeing and discretionary income) will reduce by between $7 billion (2.4%) and $20 billion (7%).

• Per household, this represents a $4,800 to $14,200 fall in consumption spending on average for each year between 2020 and 2050, with a $9,400 drop in the medium scenario.

• Investment will reduce by between $4 billion (5.4%) and $7 billion (8.4%).

• Export revenue will reduce by between $3 billion (1.6%) and $10 billion (5.2%).

Taranaki will bear the brunt of these impacts

• In Taranaki the ban will reduce real GDP by between 35% and 53%, or $16 billion and $40 billion, with a medium scenario of 46% (~$30 billion). The impacts on regional consumption, investment and export revenue are also strongly negative.

• Households in Taranaki will see a substantial reduction in their standard of living. From 2020 to 2050, real GDP per household in Taranaki will fall by $623,000, in the medium scenario. This is equivalent to a $20,774 fall in household incomes each year for the next 30 years.

• The ban is unlikely to cause any appreciable reduction in employment at the national level, but job losses within the sector (between 33% and 40%) and within Taranaki (between 3.2% and 6.6%) will be severe. Estimates of the number of jobs provided by the sector vary, but the 37% reduction estimated for the medium scenario applied to the job number figures presented in the Regulatory Impact Statement3 gives job losses of 3,107 for New Zealand.

The impact of the ban is not limited to the oil and gas sector, the overall spill-over effects on other sectors are also negative. The nominal gross value added by the oil and gas industry to other sectors will decline by between $13 billion and $30 billion, with a medium scenario of $23 billion ($757 million per year over 30 years).

• The reduction in the nominal gross value added by the oil and gas industry to other sectors in Taranaki will be between $12 billion and $29 billion, with a medium scenario of $22 billion ($736 million per year over 30 years).

We used NZIER’s regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) methodology to carry out this modelling.

• CGE is generally accepted as the most robust methodology for assessing the effect of economic shock – such as a drastic reduction in oil and gas exploration – across the wider economy.

• The scenarios used for the modelling are based on the government’s official analysis which is set out in the Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) which accompanied the Cabinet paper prepared in support of the Crown Minerals (Petroleum) Amendment Bill (which has subsequently been enacted).

The post The last will and testament of oil and gas appeared first on Pure Advantage.

Rod Oram is hopeful we can solve our paradox of being rich in natural capital, but being a poor performer economically and environmentally. He proposes a way forward.

We wash away each year some 200 million tonnes of top soil, the lifeblood of our economy’s primary sector, thanks to the way we use our land. The eroded soil clogs up our streams, rivers, estuaries and shallow coastal waters, smothering their ecosystems, which are crucial parts of our own life-support system.

We aren’t the worst offenders. Worldwide, we humans move more of the Earth’s surface each year than do natural processes because of the way we farm, quarry, build and reshape our environment in myriad ways.

This is truly The Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humankind is the greatest driver of planetary change, as geologists concluded in their international congress in 2016. Natural phenomena dramatically shaped all earlier geological times in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year history to date.

How we take responsibility or not for The Anthropocene now and over the next few decades will determine everything about our life on Earth, for good and ill. Since there’s no place on the planet to hide from this, even here on these specks of land in the southern reaches of the Pacific Ocean, our life and economy will change radically too here in Aotearoa-New Zealand. We will be much better off actively shaping our future rather than following passively in the wake of the tsunami of change.

Now we have an economy that fails to pay many a reasonable wage or meet their material needs; that is driven by unsustainable debt, production and consumption; that rapidly degrades our ecosystem on which we depend, as documented by Environment Aotearoa 2015, the Government’s first comprehensive evaluation of our ecosystem. On our current trajectory, all those will get worse. But again, we are not alone. Those are the characteristics of the global economy, albeit we give our own expression to them such as the rapid expansion of dairy farming and international tourism.

In the future, should we choose, we can have an economy that provides a high standard of living in financial and physical terms, in deeply sustainable ways; and we can do so in ways that make sense for who we are as a diverse nation founded on Treaty of Waitangi principles, for the nature of our land and oceans, and for our destiny as a distinctive, tiny country in a teeming world hungry for inspiration and innovation.

Our guide will be the planet itself, hence our need to own up to The Anthropocene. The previous epoch, the Holocene, lasted only 11,700 years — a very short but very sweet spot in climate terms. It enabled the evolution of life as we experience it today in its seemingly infinite variety.

We humans have only been sowing these seeds of destruction since the start of the industrial revolution 250 years ago. That’s only a scintilla of time in the life of the planet. Yet, astonishingly, it is only in the past 50 or 60 years that our human activity has increased so enormously that it has become planet changing. This Great Acceleration, with a base year of 1950, was first named in 2004 in the work of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.

“The second half of the twentieth century is unique in the entire history of human existence on Earth. Many human activities reached take-off points sometime in the twentieth century and have accelerated sharply towards the end of the century. The last 50 years have without doubt seen the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind,” wrote Will Steffen and colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in their 2004 book on their IGBP work.

“In a shrinking world, seemingly unrelated events can be links in the same chain of cause and effect. Nature, politics, and the economy are now interconnected,” Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, writes in his book Big World, Small Planet. “The web of life is fully connected, encompassing all of the planet’s ecosystems, and every link in the chain matters.”

Getting to grips with these vast issues of utter unsustainability is daunting. One of the most helpful frameworks for doing so is the Planetary Boundaries work of Rockström, Steffen and their colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

They have calculated the “safe place for humanity” within nine bio-physical parameters. Once human activity passes these thresholds, or tipping points, there is a risk of irreversible and abrupt environmental change.

Our biggest global overshoots so far are loss of biodiversity, excessive phosphorous and nitrogen flows, and climate change. How we use land and grow food are the key drivers of the first two, and to a great extent the third – climate change. Agriculture, forestry and land use account for 21 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the second largest source after electricity and other forms of power (37 percent) and ahead of transport (14 percent).

Photograph by Saggittarius Voyage

So many more cows and humans

We exemplify some of these planet-changing dynamics in our own way here in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Since 1985, which was about when we began working on our current framework of environmental legislation, two species in particular have enjoyed spectacular growth: humans have increased by 40 percent to 4.6m; and milked-cows by 120 percent to 5m.

Both species have been highly productive. The human economy has grown six-fold to $240 billion in current dollar terms; and milk volume has trebled to 21b litres. Both urban and rural economies have boomed, putting increasing pressure on the ecosystem. The population of Auckland, for example, has grown by 75 percent to 1.5m since 1985.

Can we continue the way we’re going? For a long while, we’ve seen the tell-tale signs we can’t. Then in 2017, the OECD delivered its own verdict in its once-a-decade report on our environmental performance:

“New Zealand’s growth model…has started to show its environmental limits, with increased GHG emissions, freshwater contamination and threats to biodiversity. Addressing GHG emissions from agriculture, and especially dairy farming, should remain a priority…(and) the need to further explore the economic opportunities that more sustainable uses could yield. Developing a long-term vision for a transition towards a low-carbon, greener economy would help New Zealand defend the “green” reputation it has acquired at an international level.”
Moreover, this exploitation and degradation of our ecosystem to produce commodity products has impoverished us in many other ways. We languish at 25th in the OECD’s rankings of the 35 developed countries in GDP per capita terms, while our unaffordability of homes, our homeless population, our educational disparities, and our youth suicide rates rank among the highest in the OECD.

A paradox of poverty and plenty

This is our paradox of poverty amid plenty. Bar oil producers, we have per capita the highest stock of natural capital in the world; and ours is a world of ever-scarcer resources. Yet we’re struggling economically and environmentally.

As are many other countries, the World Economic Forum noted in its 2018 Global Risk Assessment Report:

“Globally, people are enjoying the highest standards of living in human history. And yet acceleration and interconnectedness in every field of human activity are pushing the absorptive capacities of institutions, communities and individuals to their limits. This is putting future human development at risk,” the report concludes.

Clearly, humankind will fall far, far short of those goals if we merely tweak what we do now. So, here’s a concept for how we can bring about transformative change, and fast. It’s the work of Kate Raworth, a British economist. Starting as a whiteboard doodle of two circles Kate drew in an Oxfam staff meeting in the UK some eight years ago, she has developed it into a powerful, insightful and encouraging body of work in her latest book published in 2017: Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist.

The outer circle is the ecological ceiling – the nine planetary boundaries of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The inner circle is the social foundation – 12 fundamentals such as education, political voice, energy and food – people have to have if they are to flourish and contribute to changing their communities, and as communities contribute to global progress. Between the ceiling and floor is “the safe and just space for humanity”, enabled by a “regenerative and distributive economy”.

Seven big shifts are needed

Raworth lays out seven big shifts we need to make:

From defining progress as GDP growth, which is an exceptionally narrow economic metric that excludes social and environmental outcomes, to defining it as “meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet.”
From narrowly defining the economy as a self-contained market, to seeing it embedded in, contributing to and dependent on society and the ecosystem.
From fixating on the “rational economic man’ to appreciating and responding to the diversity of human behaviours which include inter-dependence, reciprocity, and adaptability to the people and circumstances around us.
From simple supply-demand equilibrium in markets to the dynamic complexity of economies, societies and ecosystems.
From the flawed hope that growth will reduce inequalities to ensuring all people share in the means of creating wealth and receive their fair share of the rewards.
From believing growth will enable us to clean up the mess we’ve made to redesigning our use of natural resources, our products, service and economies so they contribute to the regeneration of the ecosystem.
From addiction to endless growth to creating economies that thrive and deliver for people and the planet without necessarily growing.

Many of us Kiwis want to progress, as do billions of other people around the world. We want to be wealthier in all senses of the word, economically, socially, culturally and environmentally. But we know we won’t achieve those reasonable goals by working the way we do now.

In everything we do we need to ask ourselves how do we work with nature not against it? If we figure that out, we will give the ecosystem, our life support system, a chance to regenerate, and thus be more resilient and abundant.

Photograph by Martin Vitakova

A guardian of the ocean

Our responsibilities extend far beyond our small islands and their coastal waters to the vast oceans around us. The United Nations, under its Law of the Sea, entrusts us with the fourth largest Exclusive Economic Zone on the planet. These 4,083,744 km2 of ocean, which is some fifteen times our land area, have the highest level of endemic species and relatively the least degraded waters on the planet. In addition to the south in Antarctica, we have long taken a leading role in exploration and science, and governance under the Antarctic Treaty, which came into effect in 1961, and its related agreements.

Meanwhile across Aotearoa, there is growing awareness of the damage we’re doing to the ecosystem, the grave danger of ignoring that, and the abundant opportunities for responding in ways beneficial to it and us. This is increasingly matched by actions, both in campaigns for change and development of ways to work more sustainably.

Examples of the former include Generation Zero’s push for a Zero Carbon Act and the work of 350.org.nz, WWF, Greenpeace and other advocacy groups. Examples of the latter include the work of the Sustainable Business Network on helping small companies devise regenerative business models, and the Sustainable Business Council on getting major corporates to pledge to bigger (but not yet sufficient) commitments to reduce their carbon emissions. In addition, some major corporates are showing strong leadership, such as the commitment to carbon neutral farming by 2025 by Landcorp, our largest corporate farmer and a State Owned Enterprise, Air New Zealand and Z Energy in transport, and Vector and Mercury in electricity.

Much more is happening too at the flax-roots. For example, Ngai Tuhoe have built the first Living Building in Aotearoa. Its Te Kura Whare in Taneatua meets the very demanding international design and performance standards for being self-sufficient for electricity and water. Rightly, this beautiful building looks nothing like Living Buildings elsewhere in the world. It is very much a Tuhoe expression of who they are as a people, and of their home in the life of the ecosystem of Te Urewera. Even more significant was Tuhoe’s insistence in its negotiations with the Government of the granting of legal personhood for the Urewera National Park as the basis of a new structure and relationship for taking care of it. Building on these and other initiatives, Tuhoe are working on 21st century expressions of iwi life in their communities and economic activity within “the living system of nature”.

These are just are few glimpses of the significant changes underway in many aspects of our lives and economic activity across Aotearoa over the next few years and decades.

The task ahead

Here are some of the ways in which key sectors of the economy can use this transition to low emissions to greatly improve their contributions to the environmental, economic and societal well-being of Aotearoa:

Agriculture: Three virtually pollution-free, new food technologies pose the greatest competitive threat to our conventional agriculture worldwide. The first, cellular agriculture in pharmaceutical-grade facilities, grows meat from stems cells and produces versions of milk. The second, contained agriculture, grows conventional plants indoors in LED-lit, airponic-fed systems. The third uses plant materials to produce close approximations of meat. All three technologies are developing fast, thanks to their attraction to high tech venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. The first is only a few years away from limited commercial sale, the other two are already available in small quantities, mainly in the US.

There’s no way to judge yet whether consumers will treat these alternative proteins as niche or mass products. Either way, though, they will put pressure on conventional farming to reduce its adverse environmental impact. Governments too will be pushing for big changes in farming practices because they are large contributors globally to greenhouse gas emissions, land and ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss.

Similarly, it’s only possible now to indicate broadly how our farmers and food companies should respond. The dairy and red meat sectors will have to massively ramp up their research and development to reduce their animals’ greenhouse gases, which account for almost half the country’s entire emissions; most farmers will have to shift from, say, a dairy monoculture to diversified land use such as adding some crops and forestry, or work with their neighbours to achieve the same end across their farms.

Such deep innovation must be spurred by including agriculture in the Emissions Trading Scheme and new legislated mechanisms we will likely see soon from the Labour-led Government to drive our transition to net zero emissions by 2050. Farmers also need funding for big new areas of research, for example, for measuring, managing and certifying farming practices that increase the carbon sequestered in soil. Then farmers can be rewarded in the ETS for capturing carbon this way, which improves their soil health, plant productivity, farm emissions profiles, and farm economics.

Forestry will play a major role too, thanks to trees sequestering carbon. But the sector has to rise to four big challenges. First, planting many more natives in permanent forests, and many more natives and other species in harvestable forests and drastically fewer radiata pine, which is an inferior timber in terms of its structural and rot-resistance qualities. Second, producing far more engineered and structural building materials from wood to help displace carbon-intensive steel and cement. Third, help develop international systems for measuring and certifying such carbon sequestration, so forest owners can benefit in the ETS. Fourth, making a big push to use biomass for industrial heat and for converting into liquid fuels, thereby displacing fossil fuels.
But the other half of our emissions, those mainly from the urban economy, are almost as difficult to reduce. Here are some of the best strategies:

Urban design: The carbon footprint of our cities is large. Auckland’s, for example, is seven tonnes per person per year and the Council’s goal is to cut it to three tonnes by 2040. But Copenhagen, for example, is already at 2.5 tonnes and plans to be carbon neutral by 2025. So, we need significantly better urban design and transport systems, far higher energy efficiency standards and building codes for all new and existing commercial, industrial and residential buildings.

Above all, to make our towns and cities memorable and attractive in an increasingly homogenized world, we need to create a uniquely Kiwi expression of urbanism, one that reflects the rebuilding of our relationship in town and country with our unique ecosystems and landscapes.

Energy: Move fast to convert our electricity distribution to a Smart Grid, incorporating greater two-way electricity flows, thanks to local renewable generation from photovoltaic panels, small scale wind and hydro, energy trading and battery storage. We would then benefit more quickly from changing technology and economics, particularly for the increasing substitution of electricity for oil and diesel in transport and for coal in some industrial processes, while also increasing the resilience of the grid.

We cannot take for granted our urgently needed transformation. It requires us to achieve an unprecedented speed of change, scale of change and complexity of change we have never come within cooee of before. To do so, we have to be a confident, ambitious, learning and inclusive nation so everyone can contribute to and benefit from becoming deeply sustainable. Above all three attributes are essential to us a nation: common sense of what we need to do, common purpose as to how we will do it, and common wealth from sharing the rewards widely.

The post Go Fast Go Far – Why New Zealand Needs to Change appeared first on Pure Advantage.

With economies stagnating, politics polarising, societies shattering and ecosystems suffering, I felt an urgent need to go walkabout last September.

It was my best chance of making some sense of the news from around the world. I travelled to Beijing, London, and Chicago, three cities that have profoundly shaped my life, as much so as Auckland has these past twenty years.

I came home from my walkabout feeling in some ways more despondent. The damage being done is so rampant, the vital changes needed so radical, the time left so fleeting. Righting our utter unsustainability seems impossible.

Yet if we give up we are already lost.

Thankfully, I also came home feeling more optimistic and purposeful, with a deep appreciation for the people I had met and the work they do.

They are recovering a sense of boundless opportunity, optimism, common good and, above all, values and moral purpose. They are keeping alive rationality, engagement, enterprise and freedom. They are creating political systems, social structures and business models that will help us achieve an unprecedented speed, scale and complexity of change.

They are giving us half a chance to work with the ecosystem, not against it.

They all work in small communities of interest with deep knowledge and skills, while networking widely. These are strong, learning communities with the essential attributes of common sense (understanding what’s going on), common purpose (responding effectively) and common wealth (sharing the economic, ecological and societal benefits).

In such communities, individuals are valued, helped and encouraged. In return, they participate and change, and help others change.

In my new BWB Text, Three Cities: Seeking Hope in the Anthropocene, I discuss three concepts that help show us how we can achieve this.

First, the Doughnut Economy situates the ideal economy between two circles, the outer one labelled ‘environmental ceiling’, the inner one ‘social foundation’. In between lies ‘the safe and just space for humanity’. Created by British economist Kate Raworth, this concept lays out the strong social foundation required for transformational change, and the environmental limits within which we must live.

The second concept is the Circular Economy in which the waste material from making one product becomes the raw material for making another. This guides us towards returning to nature everything we take from it, ensuring we work with the ecosystem, not against it.

The third is China’s long-term vision of Ecological Civilisation which involves wise use of resources, environmental protection and ecological preservation. This informs the values we need to achieve deep sustainability in environmental, social, cultural and economic terms.

While the concepts are new, some elements of them were once embedded in New Zealand society. We used to talk about equality of opportunity. But now we create growing inequalities in health, education and welfare. We used to conserve some of our local ecosystems. But now we systematically degrade all our land, water and air.

Now, though, we have to embark on deep change so we can achieve the biggest goal humankind has ever attempted. It is not to save the planet. It will survive the Anthropocene – even if we don’t. It will adapt as it has to previous geological eras. Over tens of millions of years a vastly different ecosystem will evolve, one shaped by prevailing conditions.

Our goal has to be to save ourselves. To do so we must give this ecosystem that gives us life the best chance it has to recover and to continue to support us.

Achieving this enormous goal will take countless steps. The three most critical are minimising climate change, and making sustainable use of land and oceans. Each in turn will take myriad steps. This can be achieved if people are wise and effective, quick and committed.

Minimising climate change dictates we must drastically cut human triggered carbon emissions to net zero by 2040 – meaning, we reuse or capture and store enough existing atmospheric carbon to negate the new carbon we add. That requires radical changes to the way people design the built-environment and economy, the materials used to make them and the energy used to run them. Then we will have half a chance of keeping climate change to less than 2 ̊C.

We have to begin right now with communities, business and government working on ways to reduce our carbon emissions far more, and far more quickly, than the immorally minimalist target our government tabled in the 2015 Paris climate negotiations. Such transformation will create great economic opportunities for all.

Sustainable land requires equally radical change in the way soil and freshwater are used. For farmers, this means developing practices that improve the health of soil and water and increase biodiversity, while eliminating artificial fertilisers and chemicals. Deep science and technology are vital to helping people understand and work with the vast complexity and abundance of nature.

For city-dwellers, achieving sustainable land and water use means minimising urban footprints and bringing more of nature into our built- environments. This includes producing more food in towns, using natural processes to treat storm water, and greening buildings and streetscapes to enhance their biodiversity.

Sustainable oceans are a still greater challenge, not least here in the South Seas. New Zealand is responsible for the fourth-largest oceanic zone in the world. It is more than twenty times our land area. Yet we know little about it. Given the great complexity of the marine ecosystem our fishery management practices are crude and probably not sustainable. Close to shore in places such as the Hauraki Gulf we are rapidly degrading the ecosystem by over-exploiting it and pouring urban detritus into it.

These ambitious goals can be achieved over coming decades if we commit right now to beginning the long adventure. Crucial first steps include the government making a much deeper international carbon reduction pledge than it did in Paris. Long-term, stable policies, devised collaboratively with companies and communities, would enable the country to meet that commitment. The policies would need strong cross-party and public support, based on a clear understanding of their benefits, and because of their intergenerational timeframe.

But treaties and policies are top-down. They alone can’t do the job. We must also have bottom-up complementary, voluntary measures to enable companies, communities and individuals to go above and beyond.

All of the above needs to be underpinned by a committee on climate change, like the UK’s, which gives independent, evidence-based advice to the government and parliament on carbon budgets and policies, while measuring progress on it.

New Zealand businesses need to play their part by following the lead of offshore corporates that are measuring and managing their carbon flows. This has become a fundamental business discipline, as much so as measuring and managing money. The London Stock Exchange, for example, requires listed companies to measure, report and manage their carbon footprint.

Likewise, carbon is increasingly a metric for company evaluations by investment fund managers. This helps them judge which companies will benefit most from engaging in the low-carbon transformation, and which are most vulnerable from not engaging. […]

All these projects would deliver substantial economic and environmental benefits. But at best only a few might happen, because society is so divided over how serious the current unsustainability is. And that won’t change until we understand how fundamental a transformation we need in our relationships with each other and with the ecosystem.

If we get them right, though, a galaxy of opportunities for our planet’s remedy and renewal will open up.

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