So what are the solutions?
What can we do every year from now on to #movethedate back towards December?
As individuals, there are steps we can all take – drive less, fly less, eat less meat, recycle more, and importantly use less stuff. We also need to waste less. Taking one example, 700 million people around the world are food insecure, and yet 30% of food production is wasted either in the agricultural process or by consumers4.
While consumer behaviour is crucial, business and investors also have role to play. As investors, we can look to companies that are providing the solutions to some of these challenges.
For example, a French engineering business combines world-leading energy technologies, real-time automation and pioneering software into integrated solutions to improve the efficiency and sustainability of homes, buildings, data centres, infrastructure and industries. The four key markets it serves consume 70% of the world’s energy. By making those areas operate more efficiently — using its technologies for buildings, industrial processes and electricity production — the company recognises it can be a huge part of the solution. Indeed the company is explicit about its strategy to ‘move humanity out of ecological overshoot’. According to their analysis in 2019, “by applying existing technology worldwide in these arenas alone, the energy retrofit and the decarbonization of electricity generation combined would move the date by 21 days.”
In the UK a paper and packaging business is demonstrating how the circular economy model can reduce the ecological footprint of industrial processes. According to the company’s sustainability report, the six million tonnes of recyclable material that it collected, sorted and reprocessed in 2019 outweighed the amount of packaging put on the market that year. The company has an established partnership with the Ellen Macarthur Foundation – the world’s leader in promoting circularity – and together they have announced a set of Circular Design Principles, highlighting how crucial sustainable design is in the battle to eliminate waste.
Grounds for optimism – and ambition
Companies like these highlight that ‘Earth Overshoot’ is not inevitable, and can be pushed back towards our ecological boundaries without leaving people worse off.
If we are to successfully embrace a more circular, more efficient and less wasteful economic model, there needs to be a system-level approach. The European Union’s Circular Economy action plan sets an example for others to follow, with policies supporting sustainable production, waste reduction and the decoupling of growth from resource extraction. At a city level, both Amsterdam and Copenhagen are adopting Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ model5 which focuses on ensuring social support for the population’s needs while not transgressing important environmental and ecological thresholds. It is a model for a more sustainable and regenerative economy, one which ascribes greater value to societal wellbeing and environmental resilience.
The most often quoted definition of sustainability comes from the UN World Commission on Environment and Development: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Despite the encouraging fact that Earth Overshoot Day can move backwards in the year, that we are only in August is an urgent reminder of our failure to deliver on this societal pact with future generations, and with nature itself.
1 https://www.pewtrusts.org/-/media/assets/2020/07/breakingtheplasticwave_summary.pdf
3 https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution
4 https://www.unenvironment.org/thinkeatsave/get-informed/worldwide-food-waste
5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Doughnut_%28economic_model%29.jpg
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