Climate Positivity: creating outsized impact
What are your thoughts and emotions about climate change? For most people it is a sense of being overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the issue. Recent heatwaves cause fear and a sense of powerlessness. Younger generations are angry or depressed. Climate Positivity starts from understanding the actual situation: the size of the problem, what causes greenhouse gases, and what already works to mitigate and reverse our emissions. There are powerful and impactful things we can do, specifically at the level of organisations and companies. In this interactive session, Karim shows you how to find these breakthrough approaches, discuss and implement them, and become climate positive, to shape a future with a thriving humanity on a thriving planet.
Key takeaways
Understanding the size of the problem. Climate change is a global problem which impacts all of humanity. What causes it, the main contributors in different sectors, and what needs to be done.
Everything contributes to the problem, so everything is part of the solution. Many solutions to mitigate or reverse greenhouse gas emissions exist and are being developed; the task is deploying them at scale as quickly as possible. Everyone has a role to play in this.
Creating outsized impact. Companies and professionals have far more impact than they realise, on a completely different scale than individual actions.
Interaction
This is an interactive session in which Karim puts several questions to the audience. Participants share their own thoughts and emotions about climate change, identify where their profession and their organisation have outsized impact, and choose a first climate-positive action to take into their work environment. Q&A at the end.
Session overview
Climate change is the first truly global problem, and the standard response is to do less: fly less, eat less meat, use less energy. That buys us time, but it does not get us there, and it leaves people in denial, angry, or depressed. Karim starts with the honest picture: how large the problem is, what the carbon budget looks like, and the main causes of greenhouse gas emissions. The key realisation is that everything contributes to the problem, from energy and construction to logistics, food and cooling, and so everything is also part of the solution.
The good news is that the solutions largely exist. Millions of dedicated people are working on them, from startups to global companies. The important thing now is to speed up their deployment at scale in energy, construction, logistics, and all other sectors. Every company is involved through the products it makes, what it procures, and the arrangements it makes with its stakeholders. Organisations can have enormous impact, and professionals have far more impact through their work than through their private consumption choices. Doing things individually matters; doing them as organisations has impact on a completely different scale, from thousands to millions of times as much.
Karim gives inspiring examples of people who made outsized contributions to reducing greenhouse gases by thinking at this professional and systemic level: an engineering team whose invention saved a truly mind-boggling amount of emissions, a young chemist producing zero-carbon cement, a bank pricing sustainable farming practices into loans, a satellite team finding methane leaks. Each of them worked from their own expertise and with their own organisation to achieve this outsized impact.
The session ends with every participant finding out what Climate Positivity would mean for their own professional role and sector, committing to a first step to discuss this in their work environment, and leaving ready to experiment with new approaches.