It seems that we live in an era of deepening crises. From Covid to climate change to geopolitical turmoil, there is much to be concerned about.
As innovation professionals, however, we can do more than just worry. Since social, economic, scientific and technology innovations are the pathway out of crisis, we’re much better off rolling up our sleeves and getting busy. And with that in mind, InnovationLabs is developing a new suite of services to support companies, cities, and regions to attain “Net Zero.”
For the last few months we’ve been working on a new book about Net Zero, which will be out in September. Here is a short excerpt.
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There is now no doubt that the destiny of humanity lies in our cities. The human population crossed the halfway point around 2010 on our journey toward becoming a fully urbanized civilization, and each day the populations of our cities continue to increase while rural populations decline.
But we live in turbulent times, and due particularly to worsening climate change, the fate of those very cities is now in question. Will they thrive, or will they be overwhelmed by the tumultuous storms and bitter droughts brought on by climate change?
Much of the human drama over the next century will be defined according to our ability adapt to a new, entirely unprecedented, and frightening set of climate conditions. But we must adapt, which really means that we must innovate, so perhaps it is our ability to innovate that will largely determine our fate. Innovate well and we can survive and thrive; fail to innovate and we are doomed to prolonged suffering and decline.
The necessary innovations will be developed across countless dimensions of modern society. They will involve how we build, what we build, and what we build with. They will impact our systems of food and water, our ideas about a healthy economy, our approaches to governance and decision making, and our use of technology. And perhaps most of all, they will involve a fundamental change to the energy infrastructure of civilization, both in terms of where we get our energy from, and how we use it. Fossil fuels will be replaced by other sources that do not produce greenhouse gases, a switch that’s going to be a massively expensive and hugely disruptive technological, economic, and social transformation.
And this transformation will occur, by and large, in our cities. Cities are the catalysts that created civilization, and they are now also becoming the innovation catalysts that will enable the transition to a new and sustainable energy infrastructure.
Our forthcoming book is about all those innovations, and how they can be designed to bring forth a new city, the Net Zero City.
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The global economy of the 20th century was stunningly innovative, and based on its constant nurturing and perfection of countless innovations, amazingly effective at transforming raw materials into public and private wealth.
The 21st century innovation challenge requires us to transform that very economy, and to replace its underlying fossil fuel energy systems, but without wrecking the economy in the process. This challenge is perhaps an order of magnitude more complex than what was achieved in the 20th century, primarily because we no longer have time for it to unfold at its own pace. Nor is it a matter of waiting for innovations to emerge spontaneously from efforts of the private sector.
The massively adverse impacts of climate change are becoming more evident as they also become more destructive with each passing year, and leaders in science and government have realized that unless we make significant changes to how we live and work, we are tragically destined to endure significantly worse climate conditions than we are already experiencing. We already have irrefutable evidence that climate change threatens to destroy entire cities on all continents, and to cause massive damage to others that it doesn’t entirely wipe out. Horrible floods, punishing storms, exhausting droughts, and massive fires are now a daily part of the news, and apparently much worse is soon to come. It is indeed a climate emergency.
Our current systems for living are significant producers of greenhouse gas emissions precisely because of their reliance of fossil-based energy for cooling and heating, transportation, lighting, and the production of goods and services. As all of these activities are concentrated in the world’s cities, if we are going to limit the Earth’s warming to a tolerable range, we must learn how to limit greenhouse gas emissions by and in our cities.
We therefore must now develop new tools, new behaviors, new mindsets, and new systems for living, a civilization-wide innovation challenge of the highest order.
The term “Net Zero” describes the end goal, as a Net Zero building, or city, or civilization, is one that produces no net greenhouse gas emissions at all. Climate scientists have suggested that achieving Net Zero prior to 2032 must be adopted as a global priority for governments at all levels, from neighborhoods to nations, in order to avoid permanent alteration of the climate and a worsening crisis situation for billions of people.
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The book is “Net Zero City.” It provides extensive guidance and detailed roadmap that companies and communities can follow to begin their own journey to Net Zero.
We’ll let you know when it’s available.
Photo: The town of Youdunjie in Poyang county, Jiangxi suffered particularly acute flooding in July 2020. (Image: Alamy)