Is Net Zero the finish line?
I've always had a pretty simple success criteria for myself as a human, and for Wholegrain Digital as a business. Success for me means that the world is better off because we exist. If successful, whatever resources we take or harm we do will be outweighed by the contributions we make.
Of course, life is complex and while the concept of doing more good than harm is simple, it's not a tangible metric that you can measure through Google Analytics and plot on a graph. It does, however, serve well as a lens through which to view our challenges, opportunities and our general direction of travel in life and business.
It's through this lens that I've been thinking about corporate and governmental Net Zero pledges and wondering where exactly they fit in our efforts to create a sustainable society. On the one hand, the concept of Net Zero represents doing no harm or looked at another way, a state of equilibrium. This makes sense to me because sustainability is in essence, a state of equilibrium. What's consumed must be replenished. What's damaged must be repaired. The net impact on the natural environment must be zero.
I'll admit that I do have some issues with some of the ways in which Net Zero is being promoted and applied, and I’ll write about that another day, but I think that if untainted by politics and marketing, Net Zero is a good philosophy for maintaining healthy ecosystems. There's just one teeny weeny problem. We don't have a healthy ecosystem. We have a highly strained ecosystem with declining biodiversity, eroding topsoil, an overheating atmosphere and acidifying oceans. The job we currently face is not to maintain the status quo in our environment but to repair the environment and restore balance.
Instead of setting targets to be Net Zero by 2030, or 2040, or 2050, perhaps we should instead be setting targets to repair the environment by 2030, restoring it to a point where it is in equilibrium with our society. After that we can focus on being Net Zero and trying to maintain that balance over the long term.
I've actually thought this way for a long time. In 2008, Vineeta and I launched a campaign called Climate Rehab, calling on businesses to go beyond carbon neutral and support projects to drawdown more greenhouse gases than they emit in order to help repair the atmospheric balance of our planet. Needed needless to say, Climate Rehab was a flop. At the time, even the concept of being carbon neutral was considered fairly radical and we struggled to communicate the idea that there was a need to go beyond it. However, times have changed and I think we're ready to be having this conversation, not just in niche pockets of environmentally conscious businesses, but in society more broadly.
Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever, together with Megatrend expert Andrew Winston, recently published a book called Net Positive: how courageous companies thrive by giving more than they take. The book promotes the idea that we need to stretch our imaginations and our ambitions beyond simply being neutral and actually make things better. This I believe is where we need to set our sights.
The word regenerative is sometimes used to describe these types of businesses that give more than they take and actually help restore natural systems. It’s a good word to focus the mind on what a Net Positive business might look like, and it’s here that we can find examples, even if not many. Regenerative agriculture has become something of a buzzword recently and not all businesses that use it are truly regenerative, but agriculture is a great place to look for inspiration as these business are working directly with natural systems in a way that most other businesses are not. My favourite is the Olive Oil company Two Fields, who nurture not just their 200 olive trees, but the ecosystems on which they depend, starting with the micro-organisms in the soil. Dare I say it, but I think they are probably the closest I have come to finding a sustainable business. The olive oil is pretty damn good too!
At this point, those of you who subscribe to this newsletter might have spotted that two weeks ago, I wrote an article suggesting that Perfection is the enemy in our pursuit of sustainability. Now here I am saying that Net Zero isn't good enough and that we need to go beyond it. Am I contradicting myself?
Maybe, but hang in there a minute. In my article about perfection, I also said that we should view sustainability as a direction and speed of travel rather than a destination. Net Zero, by defining a fixed point to aim for, is a destination. Net Positive or Regenerative Business on the other hand do not define where we should stop, but point ever forwards toward a better world. Businesses cannot magically be become better than neutral overnight, but we can set our sights beyond the horizon of Net Zero and move forward from wherever we are now.