Zero Ideas

I’ve been noodling for a few years about the limitations of a conservation mindset for tackling climate change, when climate change is a transition problem not a conservation problem. I’ve only more recently seen how this same limitation is shared, for different reasons, by the corporate world and most of the environmental movement. When something is so entrenched it can be hard to see. I’m grateful as usual to Responsible Investor and Lucy Fitzgeorge-Parker for the opportunity to noodle out loud.

Plenty of people talk about 'rebranding' #ESG. John Marshall and the Potential Energy Coalition team have done comprehensive, multinational research into how investors and the general public respond to ESG and to alternative terms and ideas. I'm delighted to share what they found in this piece for (as it turns out) the appropriately named Responsible Investor.

What are non-executive directors reading on the beach this summer? Hopefully this digest of the Zero Ideas research report on Seeking Impact for the Centre for Climate Engagement at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge, kindly shared by the team at Chapter Zero (no relation).

A constructive critique of science-based targets from Zero Ideas.

What has micro finance got to do with climate finance? They are both about mobilizing finance in pursuit of a societal goal. But when micro finance didn’t work out as planned, the sector put its financial interests first and rewrote the societal goal to fit, resulting in the ‘financialization of poverty’. Are we headed the same way with the financialization of climate change? See my comment article for Responsible Investor, adapted from my research report for Centre for Climate Engagement at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge.

It’s time to challenge the finance-led theory of change that is shaping the corporate world’s climate action. That is one of the compelling findings of the recent research report from the Centre for Climate Engagement at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge and Zero Ideas. And it’s the theme of this comment article for Responsible Investor that draws on that research. https://lnkd.in/euQE9VW7

Excited to share the latest Zero Ideas research report, together with the Centre for Climate Engagement at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. The report looks at why climate risk is an inadequate lens for companies to use for their climate agenda, why they need to seek impact directly, and how theories of change can guide them in doing that. Thank you to Emily Farnworth, Eldrid Herrington and the Hughes Hall team for a wonderful collaboration, and to the people interviewed for this research for their critical, if anonymous, insights. https://lnkd.in/efwkgmTD

When vital investment projects in offshore wind in both Europe and America get abandoned by one of the companies most competent to deliver them, we need to ask what we are doing wrong. See our perspective on this in Responsible Investor:

Zero Ideas has made its first appearance in the New York Times, courtesy of the article below featuring the Later is Too Late research report we produced in partnership with Potential Energy, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the Meliore Foundation. The 23-country, 56,000-person research study explores what motivates people across the world to support government climate action, and what that means for promoting climate policies that people will get behind.