Abstract
If humanity’s 21st century challenge is to create a world that meets the needs of all within the means of the living planet, right now all countries need to transform to achieve it - albeit in different ways given unique contexts and histories. Kate Raworth and Andrew Fanning will present the core concepts and tools of Doughnut Economics and share perspectives for Aotearoa / New Zealand with examples from change-makers worldwide –in communities, cities, and government - who are working to turn these ideas into transformative action.
About the presenters
Kate Raworth is an ecological economist focused on making economics fit for 21st century realities. She is the creator of the Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries and author of the best-selling book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. Kate is also the co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, which is putting these ideas into action with communities, cities, businesses, and educators.
Dr Andrew Fanning is an ecological economist exploring how to move our interconnected societies towards the goal of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. He is passionate about finding ways to make progress towards this goal visible in data. Andrew is Research & Data Analysis Lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. His research has been published in leading journals, such as Nature Sustainability and Lancet Planetary Health, and he presents ideas and results regularly in different settings.
Video recording
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Transcript
Kerryn Fowlie:
[speaking in te reo Māori] Tēnā koutou katoa. E mihi ana ki a koutou, kua tae mai ki te tautoko tēnei kaupapa. Kei te mihi ahau ki a Kate Raworth, kōrua ko Andrew Fanning, ko ngā kaikōrero o te rā. Tēnā kōrua. Nau mai, haere mai ki Te Tai Ōhanga.
Welcome, everybody. Lovely to have so many people on the call today.
[speaking in te reo Māori] Ko Kerryn Fowlie toku ingoa. He manu taki Economic Strategy Directorate ahau. Nō reira, tēnā koutou.
Yeah, it's great to have so many people online today for the next in our wellbeing seminar series. I'm really looking forward to this talk and the discussion afterwards.
If you've been following the series, you'll be aware that it was launched about a year ago with the purpose to provide insights for Treasury's first Wellbeing Report. Te Tai Waiora is one of four stewardship reports that Treasury is now responsible for producing and was published in November of last year as an independent report that uses the Living Standards Framework and also He Ara Waiora to provide a high level overview of wellbeing in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It looks at the state of wellbeing, trends in wellbeing, and also the future of wellbeing in terms of sustainability and risks.
And today's guests from the Doughnut Economics Action Lab add to a very impressive lineup of international and domestic speakers we've had the great pleasure to host as part of this series over the last year. So let me now please introduce Kate and Andrew who we are absolutely delighted to have with us.
I think I read “Doughnut Economics” about four or five years ago, and I am feeling slightly starstruck to be introducing Kate today. So Kate Raworth is the creator of the Doughnut, a concept that aims to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. She is also the co-founder of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, which is putting these ideas into action with communities, cities, businesses and educators. Her internationally bestselling book, “Doughnut Economics. Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist” has been translated into over 20 languages and has been widely influential with diverse audiences.
Kate's also a Senior Associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute. She's also a Professor of Practice at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. And over the last 25 years, Kate's career has taken her from working with microentrepreneurs in the villages of Zanzibar to co-authoring the human development report for the UNDP in New York, followed by a decade as senior researcher at Oxfam. So, I think we can all agree it's a very impressive resume. We're delighted to have you here today, Kate.
Dr. Andrew Fanning is an ecological economist exploring how to move our interconnected societies towards the goal of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. Andrew is a Research and Data Analysis Lead at Doughnut Economics Action Lab and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. His research has been published in leading journals such as Nature Sustainability and Lancet Planetary Health, and he presents ideas and results regularly in different settings. So very pleased to have you here today too, Andrew.
So the topic of today's presentation and Kate and Andrew will be presenting on the core concepts and tools of Doughnuts Economics and sharing perspectives for New Zealand with examples from change makers from around the world who are working to turn these ideas into transformative actions.
There are many synergies between the Doughnut and the wellbeing frameworks that we have been using at Te Tai Ōhanga - the Treasury, being the Living Standards Framework and He Ara Waiora. And these frameworks are all seeking to prompt advisors and decision makers to be thinking about the broader impacts of their advice on decisions, whether they be economic, social, or environmental. And I'm particularly looking forward to hearing how the Doughnut Economics Action Lab has been working to, with others, to put these ideas into action. It's very relevant to our work across the public sector to ensure we provide good policy advice by thinking really broadly about the issues, thinking long term, and also thinking about distributional differences.
So just in terms of the logistics, Kate and Andrew present for around 45 minutes, and then we'll have the remainder of the time for questions and discussions. As our speakers present, please post your questions using the Q&A function on Teams, and if you have any technical queries, please use the standard chat function to let us know.
Over to you, Kate and Andrew. Welcome again, really looking forward to this discussion today.
Kate Raworth:
Thank you so much for such a generous introduction and I know we're both really delighted to be here with you. It's late on our Monday night. I know it's early on your Tuesday morning, and it's the privilege of this technology that enables us just to have a real conversation across such timelines and with such mutual frameworks and concerns and interests. So, I'm really looking forward, I know Andrew is too, to presenting this and then to turning into discussion, how do the concept of Doughnut Economics relate to the Living Standards Framework and indeed, the whole philosophy that's been adopted in Aotearoa New Zealand, towards wellbeing. So, I'm going to share my screen.
One moment. I'm sharing my screen here. Take us into, looking at Doughnut Economics in practice. On the presentation we put two together for you is particularly thinking what can be useful? This is our practice, how can it be useful in the light of the practice that you have in Aotearoa New Zealand?
So I'm going to start with 20th century economics because this is how my education started and I think even if people didn't study economics at university, we've been affected by ideas from economics, all of us in public debate, in politics, in the newspapers. So in 20th century economics, and I'm calling it 20th century because it's my very subtle way of saying I think it's really very out of date.
The first diagram that we learn is supply and demand. It's the market. At the heart of economics, welcome to economics, here is the market. Supply and demand that puts price, monetary price, at the centre of our vision. Makes it the metric of concern, that is apparently how we conduct economics with money as the metric. And it means that other issues that matter get pushed to the periphery if they are external to a price or external to a market trade.
So if you want to talk about pollution and damage to the living world, it gets called an environmental externality. And for me, that's reason enough to move on. There's no way we can do justice to the living world on which we utterly depend if we're going to refer to it in economics as an environmental externality.
The biggest image of the economy is a diagram and you don't need to look into all the details. What we can see here is the idea of the flow of money going around and around, and the flow of goods and services going round and round in circles between households and businesses, and the role of banks and government and trade. But you can see just from this diagram, everything is a circle, it's self-contained and it goes around and round.
If I was to give you a few minutes to look at it, you'd quickly notice there's absolutely no mention of the living world. There's no mention of all of Earth's resources or indeed energy that are required to make an economy go round and round. There's no mention of the unpaid caring worker, of parents in a household, the cooking, washing, cleaning, sweeping, that enables us to get up and get ready for work and labour every day. There's no mention of the commons where people come together in community and co-create things that they value without money changing hands, in many cases. If we're going to miss the living world, the caring work of families and the caring work of communities out of the biggest picture of the economy, I think this can do no justice to what we know we depend upon and what we truly value.
The selfie of humanity, the portrait of humanity at the heart of 20th century economics is called rational economic man. And here he is, I drew him. He would be a man. He wouldn't have dependents that he's doing the cooking, washing, cleaning, sweeping for. He's here, he's got money in his hand because that's how he interacts with the world, through markets. He's got ego in his heart, a great big me, and he's got a calculator in his head and he's endlessly calculating the value of things in financial terms. And he's got nature at his feet. He hates work, he loves luxury. He knows the price of everything.
Not only is this an extraordinarily false and narrow depiction of humanity, but the more that we are told that that model is like us, researchers found that the more that students aim to be like him, they start to value competitiveness. They start to value self-interest over collaboration, over altruism. So who we tell ourselves we are shapes who we become.
And then what we tell ourselves is our goal shapes what we measure and pursue. And the goal of 20th century economics was, of course, endless economic growth measured in GDP or Gross Domestic Product, call it that or National Income. How, what is the value of goods and services sold in an economy over a year? And the idea of success is that that increases endlessly no matter how rich a nation is. Whether you are in Aotearoa New Zealand or in the UK or indeed in Spain where Andrew is, three of the richest countries in the history of humanity. But our politicians and our governments and our economic advisors so often tell that success lies in yet more growth, no matter how rich we already are.
I personally believe that these diagrams have played a very substantial role in leading us to the beginning of how the 21st century has actually started. With multiple crises that don't get cared for and attended to, if we focus on markets and endless growth. We began with financial meltdown. We live in an era of climate and ecological breakdown, and I want to acknowledge the catastrophic floods and the cyclone that's very recently hit your country and the very real impacts that's had in many lives and communities.
We are in an era in many countries of protest crackdown where people are rising up to demand the end of fossil fuels, to demand the protection of native and indigenous lands and they are being repressed by police with water cannons, with batons. It's an extraordinary time to be a defender of the living world. And we've come out of two years of COVID lockdown.
Now these crises get reported very differently in the news, but they have deep underlying messages that they tell us. They all show us how deeply interconnected we are with each other and with the rest of the living world. They hit people with vast inequalities of gender, of race, of wealth and power between the global North and the global South. And they all arise from systems that are based on endless expansion. Financial system aiming to endlessly expand will create its own bubble that will burst. A system of human settlements and energy use and materials use that endlessly extracts from the living world will induce its own breakdown. And a human system that endlessly encroaches on spaces of wildlife for settlements coupled with ever increasing travel between countries creates perfect conditions for zoonotic disease transfer. These messages are telling us again and again, we have made a profound mistake if we think the shape of progress is endless growth.
So, how do we begin again? And there are many different ways, a pluriverse of worldviews, and today we're going to present one, it looks like a doughnut. That's why this is called the Doughnut. You can see it immediately. We offer this as a compass for human prosperity in the 21st century. One way of imagining our way out of this crisis.
So, if you think of humanity's use of Earth's resources radiating out from the centre of that circle, then the hole in the middle is a place where people are left falling short on the essentials of life, where they don't have the food and housing and education and energy and equality and income and political voice that every person has a claim to. I can say that with confidence because the world's governments have agreed in the Sustainable Development Goals that nobody should be left falling short on these essentials of life. That's where we crowdsource these from. That's a powerful thing. Every government in the world has recognised that every person in the world has a right not to live in the hole in the Doughnut. Get everyone over at the social foundation into that green ring.
But, a very big but. As we collectively and deeply unequally use Earth's resources, we start to put pressure on the life supporting systems of our planetary home. The nine planetary boundaries that have been recognised by Earth system scientists. We begin to disrupt the stable climate, the fertile soils, the healthy oceans, the abundant biodiversity, the recharging flows of fresh water and the protective ozone layer overhead. And so we mustn't overshoot that ecological ceiling. In fact, the goal is, as Kerryn said, as she introduced us, the goal is to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. Leave no one in the hole and don't overshoot Earth's limits. The space we want to be in is the green circle in between and it transformed the shape of progress. It's not an ever-rising line of growth, it's thriving in balance. If I do it with my hands, it's like a heartbeat. And I think that connects us to the most profound and possible metaphor that we have.
We know that human health lies in balance, and if we can take what we know in our own bodies and take that from the human body to the planetary body, this I believe, is the greatest metaphorical chance we have of understanding what thriving and prosperity and wellbeing means. It lies in balance.
When I first drew this diagram 11 years ago in 2012, I was amazed by the response that there was to it. People just picked it up overnight and was saying as if I've always sensed that this is what a thriving sustainable future looked like, but I'd never seen the picture before. And it made me realise the power of pictures. It gives people permission, gives them confidence, courage to speak to a new vision. And so I started looking at the pictures that many, many other cultures and indigenous societies have for millennia drawn of what thriving or wealth or wellbeing or health means. And I was just so struck that again and again across different regions of the world, across profoundly different cultures, this dynamic circle reoccurs.
And so it's a very stilling moment to realise that the outlier is this Western, I'm going to call it this Western mindset of endless growth. And there's something other cultures have long known about wellbeing, which is it's a balance. And so I'm wondering the Doughnut being a Western concept, I'm wondering if it can act as some sort of bridge between this growth centric thinking back towards a wisdom that's been held by other cultures and worldviews for a long, long time.
Can it help us recover something and learn again from them and take inspiration and move towards something that prepares for all? If thriving is where we want to get to in that Doughnut, well, we are very far from it right now. This is a global Doughnut showing you the stent of people in the world who are falling short in the essentials of life. All of the red going towards the centre is the proportion of people in the world who don't have enough food or water or energy or healthcare, measured either with one or two variables on each of those. Billions of people falling short on the very, very basics of life. And yet we've already overshot multiple planetary boundaries.
The boundary on climate change, for example, is 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We know we're well over 400 parts per million. And in fact, the Earth system scientists are soon going to be updating this diagram and telling us that with more information and more up-to-date data, this story is even more challenging. I can overlay this with headlines, right? And these are headlines from around the world in recent years telling us really devastating news about each one of these boundaries. And no doubt your own newspapers in recent weeks have been filled with local, nationally relevant but equivalent version of these shocking headlines.
And let's remember and recognise that when the life support systems of planet Earth are put under severe pressure, this of course, has very strong impacts on people's access to water, people's access to energy, people's access to food, to security, to their housing, therefore to education, to healthcare. It threatens the stability, the resilience of all of the social foundation.
The most shocking stat for me is that 1% of people in the world own half the world's wealth. There's absolutely no way such an extraordinary unequal world can move into living in the Doughnut. So here we have a picture that shows us extreme ecological degradation and extreme inequality in human deprivation. I do believe, I really do believe, our children's children will pull this image from the archive, pull these headlines, pull photographs from today from the archive and say, "Did you, you know about this? And what did you do once that you knew? How did you help to turn this story around?" Whether you were a parent at school gates or a teacher in the classroom, or a CEO or the latest recruit or a minister or a voter, community organiser. What did you do in your life, in your action to turn this story around?
What I'm showing here, if we want to turn this story around, I'm showing a global picture. So, many of our stories happened much closer to home, nationally. So here are four nations, and it was Andrew, actually, who created, along with colleagues at Leeds University, created these fantastic national Doughnuts. So, taking the global concept and down scaling the best available internationally comparable data. And you can see four very different nations here. Malawi, a lot of red in the centre, a lot of human deprivation, but without overshooting their pressure on the planet at all, on any of those dimensions. You've got China, a double whammy of human shortfall and some ecological overshoot.
I'm going to jump to the United States, one of the richest countries in the world. Still inequality, that's inequality that you can see in the centre and a massive ecological overshoot. And then I'm going to come back to Denmark because people very often say, "Oh, but surely Denmark. No, surely Sweden. Surely, Norway. Surely, Iceland." No, not any of these nations. Yes, look, it has a blue centre at the circle, which means compared to the rest of the world, they have a relatively equitable and decent social foundation for all. Of course there's deprivation there, but it's hidden in the midst of global statistics. But there is very significant ecological overshoots, as there is in all high income countries.
Now, I know what you want to see, which is your own nation. Do you want to see it? It's challenging, right? It's equally overshooting, planetary boundaries on all these dimensions. And curiously, strong overshoot of phosphorus, which is probably being used in fertilisers.
Is there any country in the world that is close to living in the Doughnut? And because this could be very disheartening. So, let me give you some good news. There is one country that's closer than any other to living in the Doughnut. It's Costa Rica. It's not there. But more than any other country, they're closer to meeting people's essential needs, almost within the means of the planet. And they've partly been aiming for something like this, but not fully on. What if nations actually aimed to do this? And we have to note that Costa Rica's doing this on less than half of Aotearoa's income and certainly less than half of the UK's income. So, it doesn't cost the Earth to have an economy that actually thrives within the means of the planet. In fact, maybe it's precisely because it doesn't have that economy that it's possible.
Let's put these together, again, using Andrew's fantastic data and graphics. Put these together in a scatter plot where the place we all want to be, every nation wants to be in that top left-hand corner where we meet the needs of all people, but we do it within the means of the living planet. And there's your nation, just to highlight it on that top line.
Now, the history of interconnection between these nations matters, right? They’re stunningly separated on a scatter plot. But let's just recognise all nations are interconnected through histories and present day colonialism, through military and corporate power, through the power of trade and finance rules, through resource extraction and the current and future impacts of climate change. And although these impacts and relations are complex, we just recognise they're predominantly flowed from impact created in the global North and affected those in the global South, recognising there can be the global South in the global North.
Just stepping back, the history of economic development has been in the direction of this arrow. Nations have seen their incomes rise and instead of going into the Doughnut, they've swept right past that corner and gone into overshoot. So, the 20th century dynamics of economic growth, GDP growth, has been degenerative pathways, all red it appears, and divisive pathways, still often failing to meet the needs of all.
Can we turn that around? Can we do something completely different? Every nation needs to transform, and I would challenge anybody who finds themselves talking about a developed country, there's nothing developed about the countries that are in red here. There's nothing developed about overshooting boundaries and undermining the life support issues for all. Can we instead take a new trajectory where these lower income nations and we've got the Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Bangladesh, India, Senegal, can they rise and head towards the Doughnut instead of past it on a pathway that's not been done before?
What would it take for that to be possible and what would it take from support and enabling from the rest of the world for that to happen? So they don't have to overshoot like every nation before them has done.
The middle income countries. I'm talking about China, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, Iran. Could these nations totally reorient, turn 90 degrees in direction and start to meet the needs of all their people while coming back within planetary boundaries, what would it take to do that? That path has not been followed yet. This is a new trajectory. And then the high-income nations, yours and ours and many others, it's very clear, visually, that what needs to happen in our nations is to massively reduce our carbon footprints and our material footprints on this world. And can we do that, while for the first time meeting the needs of all people within these high income nations? That pathway is also an unprecedented one. So from every nation here, it's a trajectory and a time of, I'd say humility and unprecedented ambition. What will it take to change this? We believe that these 21st century dynamics, which will take us towards people and planet thriving, depend upon regenerative and distributive pathways by design. So let me just say what I mean by that. To change this future and to change the direction, we need to change these dynamics. We've inherited industrial systems that are linear and degenerative. We take, make, use and lose Earth's materials. That's how we run down the life support systems of this planet.
We need to instead become regenerative, so that we work with and within the cycles of the living world. We restore the carbon cycle by sequestering. We restore hydrological cycles. We repair our relationship to nature that's being depleted. And as you can see in this circular diagram, we separate biological and technical materials. So we allow nature to regenerate herself. That's how she continually reproduces conditions conducive to life. And technical materials, human made materials from plastics or metals or ceramics, we mimic this by repairing and restoring and refurbishing and reusing, and never throwing away, because there is no away.
This means we go from degenerative landscapes. We don't just stop though at the sustainable, which might be taken to mean zero further deforestation. We actually restore. Given how degenerated the world is, we need to restore and rewild and repair landscapes. And likewise, with technical materials, not just moving from built in obsolescence to saying, well, it's a hundred percent recyclable. Can we avoid the recycling by repairing, by modular design, by refurbishing and reusing, totally redesigning products to make that possible? So from degenerative, flying past sustainable, through to regenerative.
And then the second dynamic, we've inherited economies that are divisive. They have captured opportunity and value in the hands of a few, in many economies around the world. That's why we've seen the rise of a 1% often nationally and globally. There's no way we can get into the Doughnut with such a deeply divided world. We need economies that are distributive by design, so that they share value and opportunity far more equitably with all who co-create it. And so in a similar way, we want to go, and let me use a traffic jam here to make this very simple and clear and fun. We've got a divisive traffic jam where each person is in their car, if they can afford one.
What we're not talking about is being inclusive, including buses in the traffic jam. That's the risk of what we create an inclusive economy where everybody's included in a structure that's fundamentally broken. Can we go past that stuck design, to a distributive economy that has, in this case, dedicated bus lanes so you have fast, efficient, affordable, what's not to like, public transit that gets there faster than the traffic jam, because we've designed for distributive design? So if I take from that metaphor of traffic, if we think about wages, not just moving from poverty wages, to saying we pay a living wage. It's not enough of a claim to say. We actually pay people wages they can live on. It's a very, very minimalist thing to be proud about. What if people earned not just a wage they can live on, but a profit share out of the work that they have contributed to? So can we go beyond mere inclusion to a distributive economy? And of course, profit share is one of many different ways in which people could benefit within a distributive economy.
So from degenerative to regenerative, from divisive to distributive, these are the principles. And when we first started coming out with them and when I first published “Doughnut Economics” six years ago, places, cities and regions would say, "Can we aim to live in the Doughnut?" And so I'm going to finish my section here by sharing with you the framework that we introduce, and work with many cities now. Over 70 local governments around the world are engaging with, whether it's from a town or a district or a city or indeed a nation. And I'm going to just imagine this in the case of your nation. So if we were to say, well, how could Aotearoa New Zealand aim to live in the Doughnut? What would it mean to try to do that?
Well, first of all, we need to unroll the Doughnut. We need to make some space so that we can go in between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling. And we go inside. And here's the question. How can Aotearoa New Zealand become a home to thriving people in a thriving place, while respecting the wellbeing of all people and the health of the whole planet? That is of course a long and complex question. And we break it down to what we call the four lenses between the social foundation and ecological ceiling. And we split them side by side from the local or the national where we have national aspirations, and the global responsibility. So those four questions, that overarching question becomes four separate questions. And I'm just going to talk us briefly through these, and then hand to Andrew who will talk about how we actually turn these with places into data so that it becomes a metric.
So let's start with the national aspirations and the social foundation. How can everyone in Aotearoa thrive? What would it mean in your nation to know that everybody was thriving, in terms of having decent food, clean water, good healthcare, education, good housing, energy, community, mobility, connectivity, culture? These are the social foundations of a place. And what is a good standard and what is the standard that everybody should achieve is of course a conversation of place, a conversation depending upon the traditions and cultures and diversity in your place. What do we see as a good life here, and how do we ensure it's possible for everybody? So that's the local social conversation.
Then let me go to the local ecological. How can Aotearoa restore and be inspired by its own nature? And for us, this lens of the Doughnut unrolled is inspired by the “Biomimicry” thinking of Janine Benyus, who, if she were with us today and indeed, if she were in your country, she'd say, "Take me to the wildland next door”. So I've picked here, I'm sure you can recognise, I've picked a picture of the Whanganui River. But in different parts of your nation, different islands, take me to the wildland next door. And let's just see nature's genius here, because in every place on this Earth, nature has figured out how to thrive. Whether it's up a mountain or in a valley, in the tropics, in the Arctic, nature's figured out how to sequester carbon, how to store water, how to house biodiversity, how to cool the air, how to cleanse the air, how to build and protect soil. So what is nature's genius in your place and what her ecological performance standards, of what she shows is possible here? These become aspirational performance standards for a place.
Can we build settlements and cities and towns that aim to sequester as much carbon as nature does here, that aim to build and protect soil, rather than see it washed away? That aim to harvest energy, whether through growing food or capture it in solar panels on the rooftops of our cities, that aim to cool the air on a hot day, from the treetops to the forest floor. Nature can cool the air by about nine degrees. Can we create cities and settlements that cool the air, rather than create an urban heat island effect?
So these are the local aspirations of a place. And it's for these reasons that people often say, surely Sweden, Norway, Denmark, because they know that they do pretty well on these local aspirations. But we need to put it in the context of the global responsibilities. What is a place's impact on people worldwide? And this is through the consumption-based footprint, through the global supply chains to which we are connected and impacting people worldwide. So if we think of how can Aotearoa respect the health of the whole planet, think of all the supply chains of the clothing, the food, the electronics, the consumer goods, the chemical products, the construction materials that are imported into your nation like into every other, and the stream of waste that then goes out. This is the space of our impact on planetary boundaries. This is what is responsible for that red overshoot you saw in the national Doughnuts. How could your nation massively reduce its carbon footprint and its ecological footprint and material footprint to combat, like every nation must within planetary boundaries, to rebuild the resilience of place?
And then still thinking of those global supply chains, who picked and packed the food we eat, who stitched our clothes, who assembled our phones in those supply chains around the world? Who are the people who are affected now by the excessive carbon emissions of high emitting countries and are impacted in droughts and floods around the world today? And then in relation, for example, to refugees, when people come, how are they welcomed? What's the policy? What's the culture? But also many other ways that nations can show solidarity with people worldwide, through universities, through cultural programmes, through negotiating equitable trade and financial agreements internationally, to respect people worldwide.
One last thing before I hand over to Andrew is just, and I'm going to come back to the local ecological here, because I know if Janine Benyus were with us, knowing what your nation has just recently been through, she would particularly emphasise that if we follow nature's genius of place and technique, nature's design as an inspiration for the places we live, that we will tend to be more resilient in the way we build, in the way we design and where we live and how, because nature has a resilience that we can learn from. And so I'm wondering if that might just have a particular resonance.
What could we learn from how nature would teach us or inspire us or mentor us to design? So these are the four lenses. And they can be explored either through community conversations or they can be explored through data analysis, which I'm going to hand over to Andrew now, to take us through the rest of the story of what this looks like when we actually turn it into a data story, and so many examples of countries and regions and cities that are using this as a tool for transformation.
Andrew Fanning:
Well, thank you very much, really great to be here. Let me just jump right in, and looking forward to the discussion in a moment. You should be able to see my screen. Yes? Great. Then Kate just set the scene. I have the privilege to follow up from that privilege. Or, well.. we'll leave it with privilege. But so this is the framework and it's a very, very somewhat complex framework when you raise these questions and aim to apply them. But we're completely convinced at DEAL that these are questions that underpin so much of the challenges and the opportunities that are faced in the 21st century. And they don't just go away if we don't ask them. And what we've found with cities, with regions around the world, is that when you do engage, you start seeing interconnections and you start seeing things that may not have been so visible before.
And I think it's similar to the Living Standards Framework in that sense, that it's not aiming to provide a comprehensive assessment of any one thing. What it's aiming to do is map out a general picture and hopefully see interconnections across. So where did this come? Just a bit of history, is that in April 2020, Amsterdam at the height of the first wave of the COVID pandemic, they published this report called the Amsterdam City Doughnut. It was actually after about a year's work prior to all of this. But just the nature of time, it received quite a bit of traction in the media, because Amsterdam was embracing Doughnut Economics as a means to build back better, and really gathered a lot of attention. And I started at Doughnut Economics Action Lab actually one week after this occurred. And what the methodology really did was it aimed to lay out this data led approach to answering these questions, identifying targets, identifying indicators, and making this portrait, this map, this snapshot.
We followed it up just a few months later with a methodological guide trying to dive deeper and make available this methodology to anyone who wanted to pick it up and so that they could see the structure and see the reasoning and the underpinning the methods behind it. And just last year, in April 2022, we developed now five tools that are building on top of this, which we call Doughnut Unrolled. And as Kate mentioned, we envision by opening up this space between the social foundation and the ecological ceiling, that it's a space for community conversations through participatory workshops, through exploring a particular topic. You can imagine putting it in the middle of this portrait, say a project or a strategy and saying, "How does this affect these four lenses?" And as well, you can present it through a data led approach and it's now being picked up as Kate mentioned, in over 70 cities and regions and local governments that are engaging with this worldwide.
So I'm going to speak a little bit about the data portrait of place, the methodology, some of the logic underpinning it, and provide some examples of places that are putting it into practice. So first of all, the principles that underpin this methodology, I think it's just important to note, because in some cases, for example, those national Doughnuts we saw earlier, it's more of a comparative exercise. You want to take Aotearoa and the United States or United Kingdom or Costa Rica, and compare them to one another. But with the data portrait or the Doughnut Unrolled method, we aim to give up that comparability, in favour of finding entry points for transformative action that are meaningful for this place here. So we aim to be locally relevant, rather than comparable between places.
And with all of the Doughnut Economics type of metrics, really the core issue is that it's not just comparing performance with respect to someone else in another community or with respect to trends over time, although those are important, but it's also fundamentally, it's about comparing where we want to be, the desired outcome versus our current performance. So we always want to have a vision of where we want to be in order to move towards it. Right?
Finally, with this, well not finally, there's three more, with this issue, we want to offer a holistic snapshot for discussing complex issues. So again, not aiming to be comprehensive, but providing that broad overview that allows you to hopefully see things that possibly couldn't be seen when you have a more reductionist, more drilling down into the details type of siloed approach.
We also with it, want to create an opportunity for tracking progress, recognising that a lot of these metrics across these questions have not yet been devised or they're not being tracked and monitored in the ways that are needed to address the 21st century challenges that we're facing. But we do believe that all those little white circles in the portrait, even if there's no data for them, just by flagging them and saying, "Listen, we know that health is important. We know that education, we know that climate change, and housing biodiversity, all of these are relevant." But if we make them visible, even if we don't have metrics, then that inspires people like me to say, "Hey, I want to find that metric. I want to do what is the best available thing that can actually measure performance with respect to where we want to be. So it's taking a long view and critically it's not just a data led approach.
We at DEAL are convinced that it can either begin with a data led method that says, "Okay, let's try and select as many targets and indicators as we can as an input to conversation to find those entry points for transformative action." Or you can also start the other way around. You can have a more visioning exercise of say, "Where do we as a community want to be with respect to all of these?" And then start using that to guide the data monitoring strategy that you would be looking to set up. So that's a little bit of the principles.
Let me jump in ... Actually just a quick note on the use of data, because again, oftentimes when we think of data, it's usually this very quantitative approach where when you're thinking of visualisation like those red wedges in the Doughnuts, what you actually need is that your targets and your indicators need to be comparable numerically. And when you have that in the same unit, you can divide one by the other to give an indication of shortfall for social performance, or overshoot for ecological performance. But of course, that's not always the case. And sometimes the act of finding comparable numerical indicators often flattens. It's really quite constraining in a way, because you might have to throw away a lot of relevant information that you could otherwise assess qualitatively, even if they're not numerically comparable. You put things next to one another and just start to see a contour. You start to see a rough image which has value.
Let's go back to our portrait. From the data portrait's perspective, really it's fundamentally these two core issues. What's our target or our commitment? And critically, is it ambitious enough? So it's not just saying, "What is the target? Okay, here it is, let's go." But ask ourselves, "Is this sufficient?" And then of course, how are we doing? Are we collecting the data we need? And again, there's value in noting we don't have the data that we need to be able to map our performance with respect to this target. Well, that's a useful thing to know. And actually in Amsterdam, we found one of the first lens that Kate presented there. How can all the people of our city thrive? That tends to be one of the lenses that are most well covered. It's kind of what people are most familiar with, because it typically falls within the general jurisdiction of most governments.
But we even found within Amsterdam, one of the most data rich cities in the world, that they did not have an explicit official target for food until going through this exercise and said oh, well, we couldn't find one at least. And we can flag that and use it as an input. And then maybe someone from the food sector says, "What do you mean there's no target? I have a target." And there's value to start that conversation. So what's our target? How are we doing? Across all of these dimensions of the ecological ceiling, both locally and globally, can we map those targets and also our performance? And the same thing across all of the social indicators, can we map those? And particularly in the global social, how can our city or our place respect the wellbeing of all people? That's an area that's probably the most greyed out from the data perspective, because for one part, we haven't been looking too much about the global supply chains and how the things we consume here affect the livelihoods of workers and communities in other places or taking responsibility for them.
But as well, there are so many other connections that aren't through global supply chains that we can also gesture towards like international students, or cultural connections through history, through legacy, through just many, many ... It turns into, if I think visually, like a spaghetti plot of interconnection. So that's a big thing, but still needs unpacking. Let me dive into one of these lenses. I won't go through them all, but Kate mentioned the local ecological. So the question, how can this place be as generous as the wildland next door? If I were a data analyst approaching this, how do I start, right? Well, first of all, as Kate mentioned, what is the habitat here? How could we consciously emulate life's genius, building on the billions of years of experience that she has, and how could we aim to match or exceed nature's generosity? Where are those ecological performance standards, and how can we collect them when we go to that wildland next door?
What kinds of data could we gather and how? And there are many different approaches from going out, tromping out into the wildland with a mapping exercise, to remote sensing, to desk-based research, you name it. And also we've added social connections. How can we make our relations to the wildland, to our healthy thriving ecosystems? How do we make our relations with them also visible, because we know that that too is a fundamental part of what thriving means here? So those are some big entry point questions. Kate already mentioned a bit of, say, I made that little star on the left-hand side image, the healthy wildland next door is where we would go to identify the ecosystem services there. How is nature housing biodiversity, storing carbon, et cetera?
And then as I said, we can go off and map how the nature is doing. What are the ecological performance standards? And then assess in a site, in a project, in a city as a whole, even as a nation and say, "How can we aim to match or exceed that?" In Amsterdam, we weren't able to do that for the whole city, so we took a different approach. Rather than measuring physically the tonnes of CO2 that are sequestered or the number of species of biodiversity within a one hector plot of land, we just said, Okay, in this area we know that it's a temperate forest biome, that's also on a coastal ecosystem kind of influence. Then generally it would be forested if the city wasn't here. And we know that forest cool air temperatures through evapotranspiration. In the city, does it have a target related to this? Again, we don't have something numerically comparable, but yes, there is a target around increasing the use of green space as green infrastructure. So how can we improve and increase the use of green space?
Okay, let's take that. That's the best available target that we can find. We can use that to gesture towards where we want to be and how are we doing? Well in Amsterdam, temperatures can be up to five degrees warmer than surrounding areas due to the urban heat island effects. So again, you start to get just a contour of how things are going, even if you can't necessarily visualise a wedge in a Doughnut type of framework.
This is a whole, if we looked at all of the dimensions, again, I won't go through them all, but you can see they regulate the temperature example that I just showed. With respect to cleanse the air harvest energy, house biodiversity, build and protect soil, and start to build up what that could look like and then you can start to think about how it can be visualised and communicated with others.
So that's a little bit of the data led approach. I'm happy to answer any questions or anything about any of that in a bit. But now I'd like to jump into some examples of how these methods that we've been describing in almost ideal terms have been applied and picked up by many without our involvement or just very, very light touch guiding, mostly by my colleague Leonarda Grcheva who's our Cities and Regions Lead and how cities and local governments in particular are picking up this method and running with it. So in Barcelona, in Brussels, in Birmingham, in Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Thimphu in Bhutan, in Ipoh, and many others. So as I said, there's about 70 cities now that are engaging with this.
So I'll just name a few. I want to raise Barcelona because I think it's interesting from a data led perspective that they're actually probably gone the furthest in terms of quantifying each of the targets and the indicators across all of the lenses of the portrait, and then they're coming back around to visualise what that could look like and use it as a tool for communication. But they're also doing participatory workshops. They're doing demonstrated projects and others. They're really engaging with the full set of tools that I described earlier.
In Nanaimo they've developed a Doughnut really as a city compass that they've incorporated into their official city plan for the next 20 year or 25 years and they're now building up a monitoring strategy of what that could look like at the city level of measuring targets, measuring indicators of performance. And critically when they're thinking about forward-looking approaches saying, "How can we envision policy A, policy B, policy C, for example, for transport? Or for mobility or for the built environment? Then how can we overlay different policy options and do some scenario analysis and use the Doughnut almost as a guiding tool through that whole scenario development process?"
Using Cornwall where they've developed, I think relevant for this conversation in particular, a decision-making compass, which essentially just takes the ... it's a decision-making wheel where we can imagine a project or strategy or some type of decision that needs to be made and imagine what are the impacts on different dimensions of the global Doughnut in this case or of the ecological ceiling in the social foundation. And also they've now built upon that, and again, this is legislated now I believe, to create software which allows the city staff at least to start inputting whether they think it would be moving towards closer to the ecological ceiling or closer to the social foundation if they're falling short. And using that again as just a very simple visualisation trick to show trends and directionality.
There's the government of Bhutan, which is looking at regional planning, which I think is a great example here because in Aotearoa has the Living Standards Framework and many other frameworks, indigenous Māori led frameworks, and Bhutan as well is quite famous for the Gross National Happiness Framework. But they too have invited Doughnut Economics to see how the tools and the concepts can be integrated into their own frameworks, which they're holding and dealing with. And we've run with some workshops there with city planners, which were fabulous.
Community and stakeholder engagement. This is where I mentioned those participatory workshops, those exploring a topic. This is an area that's hugely inspiring. Our colleague Rob Shorter, who's a Communities and Arts Lead is developing a tonne of activities, particularly that are very physical that allow you to step into the Doughnut that you can see in the middle photo there. They've got the portrait up on the wall on a window and they're mapping post-it notes onto it. And here's in Brussels, they did a street event where they're handing out Doughnuts to actually members in Brussels, members of the European Parliament and others who were there. It's just very inspiring to see these things coming up. In Birmingham, there's an amazing organisation called Civic Square who's really looking at neighbourhood transformation. They're in the neighbourhood of Ladywood and they're using the four lenses and many more tools to really think deep and to think long in terms of engaging with their community and how they can think about social and ecological performance towards a vision of thriving.
So there's a few examples. Once again, my colleague Leonarda is really picking up the many different entry points that cities and regions and local governments in particular are approaching these tools and these concepts, whether it's as a strategic compass or to use it to assess a sector policy or strategy, a data led approach, decision making as a community and participatory outreach activity or empowering local residents through demonstrated projects in the built environment in particular. And also as a tool to identify levers for transformative change. So I feel like I've just given a lot. I want to take a step back to as far as we've gotten so far where we're talking about 21st century economics. We've left 20th century economic man and economics far behind. So just to remind ourselves, we've offered the vision of a Doughnut about regenerative and distributive dynamics, about the need for all nations to transform.
Finally, if we were to land that here in Aotearoa, what could that look like and how could we start mapping that future here with respect to all of that? That's a little bit of how we're engaging with cities and with governments in particular from a data led approach as well as some of the core concepts and principles. We're also working with business, with communities in schools and education. We just wanted to share these final comments of saying, how can we take the ideas of a book and start putting them into action? Here's our website where you can see the community of practitioners who has now gathered around these and start building tools and concepts and sharing back these innovations with others. So I'll leave it there. I will ask if Kate has any final comments to wrap up. And then ... great, then let's open up the conversation because we have been going for a while. Thank you very much.
Kerryn Fowlie:
Oh, kia ora, Kate, and Andrew, thanks very much for a fascinating talk. I think you've offered up some really challenging insights for New Zealand at the moment as well, partly about how pervasive the issue actually is. But you've also complimented that with particular ways we can approach the issue. Which if I can summarise, I've sort of got down to asking the right questions, setting the right targets, and really objectively assessing how we are doing. And throughout that process, really drawing from what Mother Nature can tell us about keeping our communities and habitats in balance as well too. So I think that was plenty of food for thought there, and I can see the questions starting to come through. We do already have some questions in the Q&A, so please keep them coming in and we will try and cover as many of them as we can through the next 20-odd minutes, 25 minutes.
So the first one ... I'm going to couple up a couple here. There's just a technical question about when we look at the reds and the overshoots and the undershoots in the Doughnut, is that on a per capita basis or an absolute basis? But I think possibly a more substantive question around is how should we allow for the fact that New Zealand produces food for many people overseas? And link to that, I think is a question that's come up about how do we integrate the planetary boundaries concept against a global framework, in this case, the Paris Agreement that doesn't integrate cross-border consistency through the absence of embodied emissions within imported goods? So there's a bit of that supply chain, I think, issue that you started to raise there. So I'd be really interested in your perspectives on those questions.
Andrew Fanning:
Shall I? Yes, I shall. So very quickly, the national Doughnuts metrics are on a per capita based. The ecological indicators are on a per capita consumption-based environmental footprint metric. So in terms of allowing for the fact that New Zealand provides food to many other countries, that's essentially captured by taking a consumption-based approach. So most simply, it only counts the territorial ... say it's nitrogen emissions or CO2 emissions, it would only count the emissions that take place within the country, plus the imports, minus the exports. Of course, it also takes into account all of the upstream emissions embodied within it as well. So I guess how we allow for it is by taking that consumption based approach. We essentially say that responsibility for environmental burdens ultimately lies with the final consumers of those who consume the goods and services.
That being said, that's not the only responsibility metric. Sometimes there's grounds for a territorial approach, particularly because in the current world that we live in, that's often where political jurisdiction lies. So I think when it comes to the IPCC Framework, they adopt a territorial emissions approach. Often because those are emissions that a nation as an entity is, I guess, easiest to control from a government's perspective, I guess. So yeah, that's how I wanted to mention those. Oops, you're muted.
Kerryn Fowlie:
A slight technical snag unfortunately in the sense that I have lost access to the Q&A. So I'm just going to lean over and read off someone else's computer here. I think there was a question about links with the SDG goal, which I shall just try and find here as well too. So how does the data portrait link into tracking progress with the SDGs?
Andrew Fanning:
Shall I, shall I? So how do we look into tracking progress with the SDGs? Well, with the social priorities, they're essentially derived from the SDGs themselves. So they're not mapped exactly to all 169 or 172 indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals Database Framework. But the dimensions they are, and oftentimes there is some overlap. Well, there's definitely some overlap in terms of the specific metrics that are covered. But once again, the data portrait itself doesn't aim to be that comprehensive focus that is sometimes sought. Where if I look at the SDG database for example, and you see if we're going to talk about health or about education and there's 15 or 20 or 25 indicators to drill down deeper into those goals. The data portrait as we've currently designed it, it's not aiming to provide that drill down detail. But of course, many of those dimensions, as we call them, are also part of the Sustainable Development Goals.
So there are 12 social priorities of the Sustainable Development Goals and 12 social priorities of the global Doughnut, which we've also added several others in terms of mobility, in terms of community. Equality and diversity is another one that we've added in the data portrait because the SDG on gender equality is to be celebrated, but it can be missing other forms of discrimination, of inequality. And so we've added that one there. And when it comes to the ecological indicators, there's obviously clear overlap as well with CO2 emissions, with lack on land, lack on water. But we derive directly from the planetary boundaries for those.
Kate Raworth:
Can I just jump in here, on the SDG? So I often will say, what's the connection between the Doughnut and the SDGs? I will start by saying, well, they’re cousin concepts. In fact, I know that the Doughnut was on the table when the SDGs were negotiated. Some people who were in the last hours of negotiating said, "We had the Doughnut there to keep our sites on the big picture and not end up haggling over where the comma should be in the text." Then when the SDGs came out, I remade the Doughnut using the SDGs to create that social foundation as Andrew was describing. So they're cousin concepts. And a nation that was sincerely aiming to do one or the other would probably be going in a positive direction on both. Let me put positively that way. And yet, I think as Kelly mentioned in the chat, I saw a comment jump up and I'm just going to pick up on that. There is a lot that I think doesn't get picked up in the Sustainable Development Goals.
For example, high income nations, when they look at their SDGs, I understand they will focus on what is our food and health and education and housing and income situation. But the Doughnut unrolled has that global social lens. What is the impact that we are having on people worldwide? It asks us to look structurally at our relations through global supply chains, through global trade communities, through the impacts of climate change that we create. And so it take us as to take responsibility in things that might seem intangible because they're distant and therefore apparently invisible, but very, very tangible in people’s lives. I think the Doughnut unrolled does a more nuanced job of looking both at planetary boundaries and the local ecological condition. Then the one difference, something the SDGs have that the Doughnut doesn't have, is under target eight in the SDGs, goal eight, the pursuit of growth.
So it has decent work and economic growth, and we think it just misplaced to say that a goal for every nation in the world, as I said earlier, those rise nations, absolutely. I will bet my money that they need growth in order to meet the health and education and housing and food and mobility needs of all people. But to claim that across the nations in the world that they should have a goal of growth, we think is misplaced. They should have a goal of being regenerative and distributive by design, and then question, how do we do this? How do we overcome our growth dependency in order to get to where we actually want to be?
Kerryn Fowlie:
Thanks, Kate. I think just sticking a little bit with this context of more the multilateral institutions here, there's a question here around the right-hand lenses in the model require all nations to recognise their interdependence with, and indeed responsibilities to all other nations. Yet populist and nationalist policy agendas would work against this. How do we build the kind of international geopolitics that is needed to do this properly? So you've talked about clearly your involvement in the SDGs, but just more broadly, how can we build those sort of international geopolitics that help us move towards taking a broader view of our worlds?
Kate Raworth:
We think it starts by naming it, by showing it, by making [inaudible 01:03:37]. And that's why when we do the Doughnut unrolled, it's all there. Actually, I'll tell a nice story from Amsterdam. This isn't now international geopolitics, but every place is connected, the whole world. When we first did this framework with Amsterdam, they were very excited about doing the framework. But we created, and as Andrew described, we worked with them to create their first city portrait. And it's the local social data and the local ecological data. And the planetary boundaries data and how Amsterdam was overshooting its carbon emissions and how Amsterdam was overshooting its material footprint. But then when we filled in the global social story about ... and for example, we were saying, "Well, how can we tell this?" Well, we know that for example, the Port of Amsterdam is a major import of cocoa, which is coming from West Africa where there are plantations where we know there's modern based slavery and child labour.
So we cited statistics. Academically researched statistics through global supply chain work. We talked to examples of workers in garment factories who are producing garments for brands that were on sale in that city as they are in all cities or all high income cities. Now, when we first presented this lens to the policymakers in Amsterdam, the first reaction was, "Oh no, no, no, no, this is horrible. This isn't us. This doesn't feel like us. Take it away. It will never get approved by council." And we had a long conversation to say, "Well, you see your ecological footprint and your carbon footprint. You've somehow come to terms with this is you overshooting planetary boundaries, the ecological degradation of the world. This is part of you. In fact, talking to Amsterdam, this is why your home of many fair trade companies. You're home of Fairphone, you're home of the Clean Clothes Campaign, a major, major campaign for global supply chains to clean up their labour rights abuses. You're home to many campaigners. And the organisations that exist to deal with these problems. They must be real."
And to their great credit that the deputy mayor of Amsterdam, she turned 180 degrees and saw the importance of recognisers, and then became a champion of talking about it. So it's about showing it and sitting with it. It's uncomfortable to look at it and say, "This is part of who we are and we are not going to manage to transform it all overnight, but we need to take responsibility for that." So we think it's really important through the visuals that we're sharing, for example, those scatterplots of all those national Doughnuts that Andrew's created. I've watched the faces of Norwegians and Swedes and Danes when I've shown that. And there's literally the jaw drop. Is that really us? Even we think we are, we're the Scandinavians. We are almost perfect, aren't we? Isn't that who the world thinks we are?
The jaw drop of seeing this visual data and seeing the impact on others. So it's really important to create visuals that make it visible. I think the naming that we've done, so we are talking about the rise nations, the orient nations and the reduced nations. We're trying to come up with new words for clusters of countries where developed and developing just doesn't mean anything in this context. And those countries that are claiming these words really don't deserve to claim to be a developed for advance. So we need new metrics, and that's what Andrew's focused on. Produce the metrics that make visible a reality in the 21st century. We need new framings of words, and then we need politicians who actually have the guts to stand up.
And I would say Jacinda Ardern is absolutely one of them. And invited me to your nation to share these ideas in a public debate. In Wales, in Scotland, in Iceland, there are national leaders who have said, "We are not going to try to be the biggest economy in the world. We want to be a wellbeing nation. We want to be a wellbeing economy. And we're embracing a different vision." I don't think it's a coincidence the nations I've just mentioned have all been led by women at the time they made this ambition. So we need new groups of countries to stand for a different vision, stand for wellbeing economy, which the Doughnut aim to speak to. And we need the analysis and the metrics and bringing together the evidence of policies and places that actually doing this.
Going back to a slide Andrew showed earlier, the one thing we've really learned has power is peer to peer inspiration. So for all the times Andrew and I could present this and stand on a stage or go on television and talk about what are your aims to live in the Doughnut? It doesn't touch what happens when the deputy mayor of Amsterdam says, "Well, we've decided to adopt the Doughnut because it's the best model obviously to bring about the transition we know we need and we want to make." Other mayors in places listen to that with a different quality of inspiration.
What we think we're seeing now, we've been doing this for three, four years, we're being contacted more by nations like yourself, not by cities. It's been cities, and it's now nations that are getting in touch. We're now seeing national MPs from Singapore to Barbados to other countries speaking to this vision. And we think that nations are seeing things emerging within places. Again, it builds critical massive goals, confidence that there is a different vision possible. And that's why we're so happy to be in this conversation with you and others of how can these ideas help inspire transformation we know is necessary at the national level.
Kerryn Fowlie:
Thank you. I mean, I think I can probably riff a little bit off that and use one question and also a question I had myself, which is sort of talking about the nation side of things. So the question is here about, how do you see people like those on the seminar changing the actual policy and economic frameworks that we're actually using in New Zealand?
So you've talked a bit about the show and tell and sitting with an uncomfortably part, but anything else I think you can offer from a New Zealand perspective would be great. I think that the related point to that is that a lot of what you've shown us, as you've said, is very much community-based or city-based. How do we apply these types of concepts and much more of a national level in this space as well?
Kate Raworth:
Great. So first of all, let me give the caveat, of course I'm not close enough to national policies to really try and come in incisively. But let's say that what I think is relevant across many of high income countries, first of all thinking about how to ensure that, let's think about that, local social again, the provisioning of health, education, housing through what is the balance in your nation as in any high income nation, between saying, and I think we've had 30, 40 years of a very neoliberal agenda that says, well markets first. Let me just take housing. In many high-income cities and nations, there is a crisis of affordability of housing. Young people saying "I can't, it's a joke, I can't get on the housing ladder. There's no bottom rung. I can't possibly hope to get out of renting." Now the city of Vienna, over 60% of people live in what we would call social housing.
It's housing owned either by the city or city-run co-operatives. Because a century ago Vienna decided that housing is not a luxury investment asset for landlords. International asset managing companies that swoop in and buy out tens of thousands of units and houses, and then rent them back to the population. They decided no. Housing is not an investment asset. It's a, it's a human right. And therefore we're going to make sure that it's owned in a way that enables to be human rights. So that's a profound question of who owns the land and housing and how is it being managed? Is it being managed to deliver returns to the owners of that world or is it actually being managed to ensure that everybody has the right to housing and then taking that into health and education and other public provision. What about transport? Transport, enabling everybody to have affordable, good, low carbon mobility.
So I would say there's that zone, but then let's come to carbon emissions. Does your nation have a carbon target, cutting carbon, getting to net-zero and beyond on anything that's like the scale that we all should be pursuing now? The ambition and not just saying "Well, we'll all sort of sit back and get there by 2050." I find it bizarre when, well not just bizarre, but totally inadequate when high income nation like my own say, "Well we'll get there by 2050 because that's the goal." It's like the most powerful member saying, "Well, I'm happy to come at the back of the race with everybody else." We should be leading because of historical responsibilities as well as having really ambitious carbon cuts and carbon reduction, material reduction. So I'm going to go back to the Netherlands. The Netherlands has said, "We want to be a hundred percent circular by 2050."
I love that. Because nobody knows what that can possibly mean. I mean, we know you can't be a hundred percent circular, but that ambition. It's like, let's get to the moon. No, we don't get know how we're going to get there. But the point is to aim, we'll figure out the materials and the means. Let's go for circularity and we'll figure it out. But not just having this distant a hundred percent future. They said we'll be 50% circular by 2030. So the materials that being used and be used in our nation, half of them will be circular in use within a decade. And then Amsterdam have said, and then by this year 10% of government procurement contracts will be circular. So you've got long-term vision, midterm ambition, immediate market opportunity for the front-runners and bringing those kinds of ambitions in. And I would thought a nation like yours bringing in a circularity ambition at first it seems confronting and overwhelming, but actually what can we do here?
How can we redesign? How can we transform so that we actually become far more effective of reusable function? And it creates jobs because it brings hands, brings hands back to materials. It reconnects us with the things. So those are just a few things that I would immediately say where, and I don't know the answer so I'm not asking this rhetorically, where New Zealand's ambition on carbon emissions cut? Where is New Zealand's ambition on becoming circular? We know that all high income countries need to do a lot on this. Do we drag our feet and be the last or do we actually move ahead and turn it into an opportunity?
Kerryn Fowlie:
That's great, thank you. I mean, I think along a similar question here, which would be just interesting to get your perspective on. I guess the challenging part of this is could you outline the relationship of Doughnut Economics as a tool to the concept of de-growth? So in terms of the way you're thinking about circularity, I guess, how does that actually relate to growth and are we talking about de-growth? And the question here, and apologies I have to keep looking at another computer because mine stopped functioning, is should Aotearoa’s Treasury be considering de-growth if our aim is to be within the social foundation in planetary boundaries?
Kate Raworth:
Well, we were wondering whether this question came up and we prepared a couple of extra slides just in case, and I'll share them in a moment. But just going technically the definition of actually Andrew, do you want share those slides? I'll tell the story of and then you can bring in the data break. So de-growth. So when people first hear this word, they would understandably think de-growth must mean GDP going down. And I think people often think that, because it sounds like opposite, against growth. If we listen to the leading thinkers in the de-growth movement such as Jason Hickel or Timothée Parrique, here’s how they define de-growth. It is a planned reduction in reduction of less necessary goods, luxury. So that we come back within boundaries and we do it at the same time as meeting the needs. So we do it in a just way.
So when I hear that I think, well that's not very far away from high income country coming back into the Doughnut. So it's de-growing the material impact in the world. That's what the focus is on. And the reason why it's seen as very radical and very challenging is because actually very similar to Doughnut Economics, it says, it calls into question whether or not one can easily pursue GDP growth at the same time. So the dream is, it’s the dream of men.. I say dream in some inverted commas. The dream of many mainstream economists is green growth. Right? We need to green our economies, we need to use less carbon, we need to reduce our material footprints. But surely we will do that with ongoing growth because we've inherited economies that are structural dependent upon X growth. So the dream is we can keep GDP rising up and up and up then we'll reduce carbon emissions and material footprints efficiently. And we like de-growth that deeply questions whether that's going to be possible. I'm just going to pass that to Andrew to share some data that we have here, some we made earlier.
Andrew Fanning:
Andrew is muted. We can see my screen. Yes?
Kate Raworth:
Yes.
Andrew Fanning:
So if we think about this question of green growth, this data is from the website, our World in Data, which is a great resource for tracking in particular carbon emissions. And we can look at GDP and we can look at both consumption-based as well as production-based emissions. And we can see in fact a decoupling as it's called. The decoupling, meaning that GDP growth is increasing, whereas carbon emissions seem to be kind of flattening over this period. So that's what we would call decoupling or relative decoupling. And here on the right-hand side you can see there's quite a number of particularly high income nations that have been reducing their CO2 emissions as growth continues. And that's including New Zealand as you can see there. And that's actually a great, great event. It's demonstrates to me that clearly, I mean that technological improvement and innovation is one key important piece of what it means to get back within planetary boundaries. I think that it's fair to say both de-growth ... sorry? ...
Kate Raworth:
I'm going to interrupt you one minute. I could just see several people say, oh, I'm afraid there's a split experience in the chat. Some people can see it and some people can't. Okay. I think some people can see it. Sorry to interrupt you.
Andrew Fanning:
... Oh no, no.
Kate Raworth:
Why don't you keep going? Because actually some people can, I certainly can and I'm sorry that not everybody's able to see your slide, but sorry, do keep going.
Andrew Fanning:
Oh no. Great.
Kate Raworth:
I think you don't try and adjust their screen. I don't think there's anything you can actually do. So some people have left at this point, so you just keep going. Sorry.
Andrew Fanning:
No, no worries. Okay then what we see green growth in some countries, in some cases actually even absolute decoupling. But the key question then of course is that if we're talking about decoupling and growth, that we need to think about relative decoupling, which means that it's just emissions are growing slower than GDP is growing, or absolute decoupling, which actually means that emissions are falling as GDP is growing. But the key question of course is what is the boundary? What is the target? How fast and what is the rate and the speed and the scale of decoupling that is needed? And if we talk about sufficient absolute decoupling, then it would look like this, that we're getting back down below planetary boundaries. And what we don't see is any country approaching that level of decoupling at the scale and the speed that is required. We can also think to, yeah, that's handy. So in, go ahead, Kate.
Kate Raworth:
So just so what you actually see when you look at New Zealand's data, I think you see at most around a half a percent a year of absolute decoupling achieved. Whereas Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows in 2011 took data without worrying about the political appetite of hearing the news to a climate scientist. And they said, "Look, high income countries should be sufficiently absolutely decoupled on about eight to 10% a year. That's what's required." So yes, there's absolute decoupling, but it's nothing close to the speed and scale that's required. And if this feels like hard news, it is hard news, and it's true for all of high-income countries so far. There's not a single high-income country that's demonstrating its ability to decouple to sufficient absolute decoupling [inaudible].
And therefore, and therefore, just to pick in here, what do we do with that? What do we do with the fact that the evidence to date and all evidence is by definition from the past. So it's not the future, but it's the evidence from the past. But there's no evidence that any nation is sufficiently actually decoupling. We're only just talking about carbon here. It's even more true that it's inadequate when it comes to actually the whole material, other material footprints. So to my mind you say, well the green growth is, it's almost like you just want to cross your fingers and say, "Well, something will come good, some technology will come through", and I think you know, you lie in bed awake at night, what kind of technology are they going to ultimately justify by the point that it's so desperate that we have to have some terrible geo-engineering to try and rectify this schism between GDP and this decoupling required.
We think there's an ethical obligation on high income countries like ours to not only do everything they can to decouple, but to remove the structural dependency on endless GDP growth. To stop having to have an economy that thinks it needs that GDP going up and up and up and up and up endlessly. And actually to say what is it that structurally requires us now to pursue growth and how do we remove that structural dependency? Now that's easy to say, and a really big existential question of the 21st century. How do we, we have inherited economies that need to grow, whether or not it makes us thrive. The evidence today says it is not making us thrive. How do we create economies that enable us to thrive, whether or not they grow? That's the thing, that's the real transformation. And it's fascinating to presenting this to you in a Treasury that is so immersed in the 20th century created and inherited model where of course growth is built in and expected and needed and required, because we've structurally become dependent.
Kerryn Fowlie:
It's great. Thank you. We've got a time for a couple more questions. I just have one, maybe if you just answer just quickly and then I'll find a final question here. But how do you put population into this equation? So more people meaning more consumption, leading to more overshoot. I think that's partly to do with the way you're measuring this in terms of per capita terms on a consumption basis as well. But just if you could give me your reflections on how you think population feeds into this equation or feeds into the Doughnut, I should say.
Kate Raworth:
Feeds into Doughnut. I'll, I'm happy to jump in there. Here is the Doughnut. So one of the questions we ask is, "What is it that will determine whether or not we can meet the needs of our people? What will determine our ability to get into this space?" And one of the first things that we should talk about is population. And I often will talk about it first because it's important to recognise it. The more people there are, it takes resources to meet people's needs for health and education of food and housing. So the scale of the entire human population matters. And yet if we're going to talk about population, we definitely need to talk about inequality.
They're like two sides of the same rectangle. You can't do justice to talk about one without talking about the other. The stat that I put up earlier is that the richest 1% of the world own half of the world's wealth. So when we look at much of the overshoot that's going on, at least half of this climate overshoot is due to the top 10% of people in the world. So if we really want to come back within planetary boundaries, it's not just a matter of saying, "Oh, it's about the number of people." No, it's about the great scales of inequality in the world. And then here's the good news story. If I come back here.
What is it that enables country after country after country to go from having say seven children. A woman having seven children in her family? If we go back to our great grandmothers and we, if we could ask our great grandmothers, "How many brothers and sisters do you have?" It'll probably say something like 5, 6, 7. I'm one of two children, it's very common, 2.12 children. So these nations have gone through that transition. What is it that enables that to happen? This is something we do know that around the world again and again, when women and girls, when you have girls, so women's empowerment, gender equality, when girls get to go to school, when babies survive past the age of one, past the age of five, that mothers actually have the ability to believe that their child will survive. When women are empowered to work and have voice, these factors have a very strong determinant.
And when women have access to reproductive rights, these enable women to take control of their choice of the size of their families and to believe that their family will actually thrive. And that's when women choose to have far fewer children. So if I put it in another way, if we really want to stabilise the world's population, which is a necessity, the best way to do it is to get out of everybody out of the hole of the Doughnut, because then people have the stability and their trust that they will thrive. And the ability therefore to choose to have a smaller family, that's what history has shown us time and time again. So get everybody out of the Doughnut’s hole and will leave us to stabilise the wealth population, which is necessity.
Kerryn Fowlie:
Thanks Kate. Are, we are just about at the end of our allocated time, but I do just want to ask this last question which is, the Doughnut is 11 years old, it has been unrolled. What's next? What's the current edge of your insights and what are you learning about the movement to a sustainable world? Just if you could spend one or two minutes, I guess, summing up in a sense where you've got to and where you want to go to next, that'd be great. And then I'll need to draw this to a close.
Kate Raworth:
Okay. I'm going to point to Dr. Fanning because he has a lot to say about that.
Andrew Fanning:
Wow. Well I'll start and then I'll ask you to wrap up, Kate. But I guess the most immediate thing when you say unrolling the Doughnut is it's, to me it's, it almost leads to the next question is how do we then re-roll the Doughnut, if we've unrolled it to open up space between the ecological ceiling and the social foundation and we can ground local aspirations and global responsibilities and start taking those into account, then how can we then re-roll that back into a picture that a place or a country can look at and say, "Ah, there's my Doughnut." Not that two-dimensional caricature with phosphorous shooting off in a weird direction that I didn't understand. But taking into account what it means to actually thrive here with people and with the environment as well as respecting the wellbeing and the health of others and the whole planet and start seeing that to be visualised. That to me is the next big step that I'd like to see where it goes.
Kate Raworth:
And to add to that, we want to track it over time so that at the moment what we have is a single phase. This is snapshots of the world, but of course we want to know, well, which direction is this going? Are things getting worse or better? So we're currently working on creating this over time and upgrading it and updating it. This is an evolving concept and we want to keep it alive so that it keeps moving. It doesn't get, it's not static, it's evolving. What remains true with it is this is about unbearable critical human deprivations, and we want to eliminate those in the world to meet the right of people. And this is about critical ecological degradations and evolves with the science and evolves as planetary boundary scientists learn more and more about the interdependence and the better ways to measure these. But that's the data story that we want to keep telling so that we no longer have politicians standing up in parliament, "Well, in my country" going, "What we are here for is growth, growth, growth." I feel like I'm in the 1960s, it's a very weird dejavu. But are speaking to the metrics of life, the metrics of life which are not expressed in GDP, they're expressed in human thriving. Are the people thriving? They're expressed in planetary health, this only known living planet in the universe. We can have politicians standing in parliaments giving a state of the nation report year-on-year, reporting against this dashboard of life in her own terms. And that for us is a vision. And that I think is going to connect back to the Living Standards Framework, which I would say amongst many nations, that is a framework that is moving towards, moving towards this vision of life expressed in her own terms. And how do we make the data of this sufficiently rich, sufficiently regularly reported, that it actually becomes the new normal.
And why would you listen to someone say, "Oh, GDPs gone up by 1.2%." What does that actually, actually tell me about life, how it's lived and the future prospects for our children's children? This will give us a much stronger compass that we need alongside many other world views. And I hope, and I'm thrilled every time that we are invited into dialogue with whether it's Māori communities in your nation, or Hawaiian indigenous knowledge scholars or the community in Bhutan inviting us into conversation in both national happiness, can this be a way that the Western economic mindset recovers and moves back, as I've said earlier, towards wisdom, but many other cultures of long health.
Kerryn Fowlie:
Thank you, Kate. It's very sad, but we are going to have to draw this to a close now. But that has been a really fascinating discussion and we thank you so much for giving us some of your time to talk through the Doughnut with us today. And also I guess to provide some challenges for us, but also some ways where we can kind of start making some progress as well. Thank you to everybody who has also joined us online today and for the fascinating questions that have come through the chat. I apologise for not getting through all of them. Please keep an eye out for our final session in the wellbeing series seminar, which will take place in early April.
We're hoping to have an exciting panel lineup to share their perspectives on priorities for improving wellbeing of New Zealand, and I'm sure they'll be drawing on some of the concepts that we heard today as well. So please let me now close our seminar today and farewell you all with the whakataukī. The proverb is about, it says that discussion, learning, understanding, and knowledge underpin the wellbeing of all New Zealand, of all people.
So, [speaking in te reo Māori] Mā te kōrero, ka mōhio. Mā te mōhio, ka mārama. Mā te mārama, ka mātau. Mā te mātau, ka ora te iwi. Haumi e, hui e, tāiki e!
Thank you everyone for attending.
[speaking in te reo Māori] Ka kite.
Wellbeing Report seminar series
In November 2022, Te Tai Ōhanga – The Treasury released the first wellbeing report Te Tai Waiora: Wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand 2022.
This online seminar is part of a Wellbeing Report programme of Guest lectures running in 2022 and 2023.