The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking

Governance in a Climate Emergency

Ray Ison, Ed Straw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351026888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Information Management
• Index: Business

The Hidden Power of Systems Thinking: Governance in a Climate Emergency is a persuasive, lively book that shows how systems thinking can be harnessed to effect profound, complex change.

In the age of the Anthropocene, the need for new ways of thinking and acting has become urgent. But patterns of obstacles are apparent in any action, be they corporate interests, lobbyists, or outdated political and government systems. Ison and Straw show how and why failure in governance is at the heart of the collective incapacity to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergencies. They go beyond analysis of the problem and demonstrate how incorporating systems thinking into governance at every level would enable us to break free of historical shackles. They propose 26 principles for systemic governance.

This book will be inspiring reading for students applying their systemic methods, specialists in change management or public administration, activists for 'whole system change' and decision makers wanting to effect challenging transformations. It is for anyone with the ambition to create a sustainable and fair world.

1

Introduction

Crafting a viable future?

1.1 Our human-created ‘problematique’

Contemporary lived experience is of a deteriorating human–environment relationship. Expressions of this relational breakdown are far from new. Explorer and scholar Alexander von Humboldt¹ was aware from at least 1799 of the ‘destruction of forests and of humankind’s long term changes to the environment’, including ‘ruthless irrigation and the great mass of steam and gases produced in industrial centres’. The so-called ‘greenhouse effect’ in which temperatures inside the Earth’s atmosphere rise because of the properties of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, had been postulated in 1824 and demonstrated from experimental observations by John Tyndall in 1859. Numerous scholars and insightful thinkers have been open to the predicament of humankind, but few have framed their concerns in terms that begin with thinking about our own thinking and thus what we humans do when we do what we do.^2,3

Human existential angst came into its own following the development of the atomic bomb, captured in phrases like ‘mutually assured destruction’. So far, the global governance response to this possibility has worked. But it requires constant vigilance. The hole in the ozone shield was the first time modern societies realised that environmental deterioration was potentially dangerous. Widespread death from skin cancer awaited. For the first time too, many acknowledged that collective human behaviour had caused this dire situation and could cure it.⁴ ‘Ozone hole deniers’ did not feature.⁵

Despite this warning, the human world charged ahead, treating the planet as an infinite resource and an infinite dumping ground. In the meantime, and in the background, scientists were studying how and why the climate behaved as it did in order to improve weather forecasting for global food production, shipping, water provision, and holiday making. They also noticed worrying trends. The mean global temperature had risen. Today it is just over 1ᵒC above the pre-industrial period and it rises by 0.17ᵒC each decade. This might not seem like a lot, but it is. If the world continued on this trend, our world – our habitat – would degenerate severely.

These signals of alarm have surfaced in different ways in public consciousness. Those preferring to do nothing sought to deny these long-term trends. Having lost this argument, they then sought to deny that they were human-induced. This argument has been lost too. As the science developed, so the thesis expanded. Humankind was not just igniting the climate but stomping all over the biosphere – the part of the earth’s crust, waters and atmosphere that support life of all forms. Thus was born the term the ‘Anthropocene’ (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a term formulated in 2000 by earth scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to designate a new geological era in which human influences are so great that they are affecting ‘whole Earth dynamics’ through a range of biophysical and social processes.

The International Working Group on the Anthropocene⁶ notes that human impacts on the Earth include:

• Erosion and sediment transport associated with a variety of anthropogenic processes, including colonisation, agriculture, urbanisation and global warming.
• Changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and soils, with significant anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals.
• Environmental conditions generated by these perturbations [including] global warming, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic ‘dead zones’.
• Degradation of the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, species invasions and the physical and chemical changes noted above.⁷

Homo sapiens has now become a major agent in shaping the circumstances of its own existence.⁸ Acceptance of the explanations that make the case for the Anthropocene – including human-induced climate change – also means accepting that we are in a period new in human history.⁹ This is the issue of our time, perhaps of all times, and thus the greatest challenge to all human endeavour.

The human threat goes well beyond the climate to its air, water, land, fellow animals, flora, fauna and other resources. Imagine a bird spray-painting its nest and chicks. That’s effectively what we have done. Now we have to work out how to stop doing it and clean it off.

Many people, governments, companies and civil society organisations recognise this. China is looking more likely than most to do something significant. We shall see.¹⁰ But, as yet, the world is in the ‘Phoney War’¹¹ stage. There is much posturing and small actions painted into major achievements, but the fact is things continue to get worse.

So much so that the risk of ‘Hothouse Earth’ is drawing closer.¹² This term is used to describe a scenario in which human activity causes a higher global temperature than at any time during the past 1.2 million years, due to a breakdown in the feedback loops that regulate the planet’s temperature. Systemic feedback processes operate at all levels, from the planetary to the interpersonal. Losing safeguards that come from feedback processes would mean the planet has passed a tipping point beyond which its own natural processes trigger uncontrollable warming, no matter how much we subsequently reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

The breakdown of these feedback loops include permafrost thaw; the loss of methane hydrates from the ocean floor; weaker land and ocean carbon sinks; the loss of Arctic summer sea ice; the reduction of Antarctic sea ice and polar ice sheets; the dieback of Amazon and Northern conifer forests; and increased bacterial respiration in the oceans. Forests, oceans and permafrost currently do us a great service by storing carbon. As rising temperatures cause these carbon sinks to weaken, some will start to emit more gases into the atmosphere.¹³

The result would be sea levels as much as 60m higher – imagine any coastal city under those conditions. Much of the world would be uninhabitable, and food production would be a fraction of current output, such that the ‘carrying capacity’ of a Hothouse Earth would drop to 1 billion people. Whether you or we would be amongst the lucky or unlucky survivors is, of course, unknown.

Professor Schellnhuber¹⁴ said some of these changes could be reversible, but others would be irreversible

on time frames that matter to contemporary societies. What we do not know yet is whether the climate system can be safely parked near 2ᵒC above pre-industrial levels, as the Paris Agreement envisages. Or if it will, once pushed so far, slip down the slope towards a hothouse planet.

The IPCC Report of October 2018 gave humanity 12 years to act to avoid climate-induced catastrophe and set the maximum safe rise in mean temperature as 1.5ᵒC.¹⁵

In making the arguments of this book, it is important not to be lulled into the false sense of security that comes with official conversations about climate change (and other areas of public discourse). Many of these conversations are couched in terms of rises in global mean temperatures of 1.5, 2 or 3ᵒC. This language can be misleading because for a shift of this magnitude to occur, it means that there is to be unparalleled variation and surprise. If you understand how a normal distribution works, then Figure 1.1 explains what will happen. The normal distribution for temperature is moving to the right and the tails of the distribution (i.e. variation in both hot and cold temperatures) will increase, though not perhaps as much for the cold. The other language trap is that mean temperatures rarely ever occur. Under climate change, it will be extreme temperatures and their duration that will have the most impact. These effects have already been seen in the buckling of steel railway lines in Melbourne in 2009, an extreme heatwave period, when more people died from high temperature or heat island effects (the failure of night-time temperatures to be low enough to relieve heat stress) than the major bushfire that claimed 177 lives. There have been many other examples since, including higher impact rainfall events associated with the increases in energy due to the warming of oceans and currents.

FIGURE 1.1 How climate change will operate through shifts in the ‘shape’ of the normal distribution of temperatures.¹⁶

Climate change will demand more flood and storm defences and means to help populations cope with increased heat stress, especially the elderly and sick. It will also demand significant investment in re-engineering specifications used for roads, buildings, railways and sewage treatment and for managing our rivers and water supplies. The systemic effects will be huge. For example, in 2014 the Thames barrage was subjected to floods and tidal surges that almost exceeded its design capabilities. If it were to fail, London would experience major flooding. The Thames has been subjected regularly to sewage contamination in recent years because freeboards on sewage ponds, designed for less intense rainfall, have frequently overtopped due to more high-intensity rainfall. Climate change will affect all aspects of our lives, yet our news and public narratives are inadequate and our governance systems ill-prepared.

Box 1.2 Towards collapse … or not?

Jared Diamond has outlined how and why past human civilisations have collapsed.¹⁷ Climate change was implicated in the demise of North African societies. In this same area, the price of bread, and thus food production, is said by several sources to have triggered the Arab Spring.¹⁸ In his analyses of societal collapse, Joseph Tainter points to systemic factors set off by increasing institutional complexity and a declining capacity to act in response to environmental change in its broadest sense.¹⁹ In the face of climate change and the systemic breakdown in the main natural cycles on which contemporary human society depends (i.e. water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and oxygen), we sit at the most profound fulcrum, or tipping point, in human history. The key question is whether we will collectively be able to make the innovations that pull us out of our current trajectory and move us towards one that offers a safer, more viable future in our ongoing co-evolution with the biosphere.

Have you ever experienced a gas leak at home? When do you call a fitter? At the first sniff? Hope it goes away by itself? Wait, because it does not smell much? Or only once th...