Climate Action 2016-2017

is emerging with high sunshine environments
(Mexico, UAE, Saudi Arabia, etc.) at around 3
cents per kilowatt hour – at which price fossil
fuels can no longer compete. Technical gains in
system integration and storage also suggest that
earlier concerns that baseload power requires
fossil fuel energy have been greatly overstated.
Despite this encouragement, we are very
far from success. For a number of important
countries with urgent needs to increase their
power production – China, India, Indonesia,
Pakistan, Vietnam – cost calculations are not yet
clearly in favour of renewables (although they
have ambitious renewable programmes), and
they all have large programmes of new coalbased
generation. So too, investment in energy
efficiency, while hugely attractive economically,
is nowhere close to the tipping point required.
Achieving this pace of change requires a new
strategy to complement the ongoing decline in
the price of renewables. It would require highlevel
political and financial engagement to shift
incentives in those countries where the shift to
low carbon is most difficult.
From take-make-waste to a circular
economy. Over the past century, global demand
for natural resources has grown tremendously.
Looking ahead, materials harvested, extracted
and consumed worldwide are expected to
increase to 100 billion tonnes per year by 2030
– a 40 per cent increase from today. If we keep
linear approaches to the production, design, use
and disposal of materials, our global solid waste
generation rates alone will exceed 11 million
tonnes per day, more than three times today’s
rates, by 2100. A radical shift towards more
circular production and consumption systems is
clearly an idea whose time has come.
We need to loop our production, consumption
and waste management processes; design
waste out of the economy and make use of
waste outputs from one system as inputs for
others; and keep a given resource and its value
circulating in the economy as long as possible.
Good practice is emerging in many countries and
industries. Europe is showing some encouraging
trends, with national and EU policy being shaped,
as well as business coalitions. Accelerating
circularity across global supply chains can yield
an estimated US$1 trillion or more per year by
2025 to the global economy. But the overall pace
of change remains grossly inadequate if we are
to take pressure off common resources to the
extent required.
DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOUR REQUIRED
In each of these areas there is a beneficial path
forward. But this won’t happen automatically,
"Wind energy is already
competitive with fossil
fuels over almost half
the Earth’s surface, and
a new generation of
solar deals is emerging
with high sunshine
environments ."
or with only incremental change. Such a future
requires transformational shifts in policy and
behaviour along with unusual political, social
and corporate partnerships, and needs to be
understood in the context of movements rather
than policy shifts.
A successful strategy will require a much
greater focus on how to catalyse these megatransformations
as an essential complement
to current efforts. We need ‘hockey stick’-type
take-offs that are non-incremental, with cascading
impacts that ultimately ‘tip’ our economic and
social systems to reduce the great strain on our
global environmental commons. Much can be
learned from existing examples of positive tipping
points that have exceeded anything previously
anticipated. Examples include the sudden shift in
social acceptability of same-sex marriages; the
radical improvement of economic policies in 100
countries between 1985 and 2000; the halving of
maternal mortality rates in the first 15 years of this
century; and the spread of bike sharing from zero
to 850 cities in less than 10 years.
"We need to be much
more strategic in
supporting citizen
mobilization, and
diagnose the potential
paths of influence and
seize them."
Upon examining them, we must identify
common features that can trigger the policy,
corporate and behavioral shifts leading to the
transformative change we need. We need to
identify the ‘sticky’ messages that will inspire
action, and the winning messengers to convey
them. We need to be much more strategic in
supporting citizen mobilization, and diagnose
the potential paths of influence and seize them.
And we must develop technical and political
strategies to bring them together with the
disruptive power of information technology
and multi-stakeholder cooperation, which are
already driving profound and far-reaching
convulsions in our wider models of government,
business and society today.
These are the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle
that must be brought together to decouple
our human economic footprint and protect the
global commons. The task ahead is huge. But
new technologies and emerging practices offer
unprecedented hope for the future.
Dr. Andrew Steer is the President and
CEO of the World Resources Institute. He
joined WRI from the World Bank, where he
served as Special Envoy for Climate Change
from 2010-12. From 2007 to 2010, he served
as Director General at the UK Department
for International Development (DFID)
in London. Dr. Steer is a Global Agenda
Trustee for the World Economic Forum,
and is a member of the China Council for
International Cooperation on Environment
and Development (CCICED), the Leadership
Council of the Sustainable Development
Solutions Network, the Energy Transitions
Commission, the Champions 12.3 Coalition to
reduce food loss and waste, the Sustainable
Advisory Groups of both IKEA and the Bank
of America, and he serves on the Executive
Board of the UN Secretary General’s
Sustainable Energy For All Initiative.
The World Resources Institute (WRI, www.
wri.org) is a global research organisation
that spans more than 50 countries, with
offices in the United States, China, India,
Brazil, Indonesia and more. Our more than
450 experts and staff work closely with
leaders to turn big ideas into action to sustain
our natural resources – the foundation of
economic opportunity and human wellbeing.
Our work focuses on six critical issues
at the intersection of environment and
development: climate, energy, food, forests,
water, and cities and transport.
WATER & AGRICULTURE
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