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I’m Grant Symons. I convene Transition Edge to help us understand how we can transition to a low carbon sustainable world using leading thinking and practices.

If you had a job in IT and business consulting in the late 1990's it was 'happy days.' The fear that ill-prepared computer systems would malfunction at midnight as we crossed into the new millennium because of their internal clock systems drove unprecedented spending and activity across every sector and supply chain. Hence the name Y2k for the year 2000 systems switched over.

Eager sales teams targeted anyone with a budget and the possibility of being embarrassed by a system blackout or failure. They sold them on products and services in such quantities and high prices that spending across the sector was exhausted for years afterward. 

According to one review, the USA alone spent over $100 billion in preparations which was a relatively significant expenditure and would be followed by mounting expenditures on the War on terror, the great recession of 2008, and more recently Covid 19.  

In the end, no one will ever know for sure whether there would have been severe negative consequences or not. Still, nothing much happened at the stroke of midnight; business as usual carried on, as did the damage occurring to the Climate/ecosystems. 

And in hindsight, had there been more focus and expenditure on the essential War on climate change beginning in the 1970s when we started to understand it, history may have been different.

Fast forward to the 2020’s, and we now have an array of frameworks, policies, and terms that have been created to help organisations arrange their affairs, allegedly in ways that are congruent with saving the planet. Or at least saving their reputation, brand, share price in the first instance; the main ones are:

• SDG – Sustainable Development Goals. 
  • Adopted by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.
• GRC - Governance, Risk, and Compliance 
  • The elements an organization must put in place to achieve its strategic objectives and meet the needs of stakeholders.
• CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility
  • The concept originated in the 1800s, and the term Corporate Social Responsibility became popularised by American economist Howard Bowen in the 1950s. CSR sets the broad objectives and position of the organisation and is intended to shape the values and culture of the organisation in positive ways.
• ESG- Environmental Social Governance
  • ESG uses environmental, social, and governance factors to evaluate sustainability practices within a company. ESG criteria make such business' efforts measurable."

Over the past decade, an extensive ecosystem of consultants, advisors, experts, and internal department personnel have evolved to support the work required in strategising, visioning, planning, reporting, accounting, analytics, investor relations, markets, communications, PR, lobbying, and brand management.

Many people are doing great work in these fields. Still, until recently, some senior commentators across Govt, academia, and business groups deemed much of this activity as puffery, mostly concerned with looking good and telling a good story. And in reality, they are probably right.

Worryingly, the push in this direction is becoming much stronger. Possibly heading towards frenzy status:

• Millennials want to work for and or invest in organisations that are perceived to be doing the right thing.
• Policymakers want more transparency and Climate change action.
• Society wanting responsibility and accountability for what is wrong.
• There are trillions of dollars looking for safe and or high returns on investment. We have unicorn and zombie companies and eye watering levels of govt spending.
• There is increasing liability for directors and those in governance positions.
• There are consulting firms that want to build on the hundreds of thousands of people they employ already and make a lot more money.
• All of this generates momentum, herd mentality, and FOMO (fear of missing out).

These forces may be somewhat analogous to the Y2K frenzy, but this time they are dramatically larger in scale and scope and have serious consequences if we get it wrong. We are talking globally here, but New Zealand does have it's own unique challenges. 

For those not familiar with Russian roulette, it is a game of chance played with a revolver. A single bullet is placed in one of six empty chambers, and when the trigger is pulled, anything in front of the barrel stands a one in six chance of getting hit. 

The problem we see is that our symbolic revolver is already loaded with five bullets, not one.

1. We are dangerously close to atmospheric GHG thresholds that are likely to be exceeded if this quantum of investment is unleashed in business-as-usual fashion (including blind faith in technology and economic growth).
2. Energy and resource constraints will be bought forward, leading to radical fluctuations in supply, demand, and prices in future.
3. Potential destabilisation of the financial system through inflation/ stagflation.
4. Acceleration of negative environmental impacts on top of the existing ones.
5. Increasingly distorted wealth distribution.

We can just put the gun down and carefully and unload it if we want to.

But this is likely to be an enormously challenging task. Globally we are facing "an unprecedented situation" (Christiana Figueres and Angels Merkle's words), that is more like a crazy party, than a transition.  

The mix of fear among politicians, bureaucrats, people in responsible positions, and greed and speculation among those who do not understand that the revolver is nearly fully loaded will take some considerable skill to navigate.

New ways of reconciling and prioritising our course of action are required; pure politics and a purely market-driven approach are unsafe. We need to revert to science, engineering and exemplary risk management - rapidly.

And the good news, New Zealand is headed in this direction and leads the world in enacting new law that will require major organisations to quantify and disclose the climate change and transition risks being faced. This is planned to come into effect in early 2023.

In the meantime you can start your transition with our Real Transition Leaders programme. Find out more here.