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—Nick
In order for nations to flourish, equality and prosperity must be available to everyone – regardless of gender, race, religious beliefs or economic status.
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Too much of the world’s wealth is held by a very small group of people. This often leads to financial and social discrimination. When every individual is self sufficient, the entire world prospers.3
The pandemic has set progress of this goal back by roughly 10 years. Inequality across the world has worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor within countries continues to widen, according to the latest World Inequality Report.
The top 10% of the highest earners in the world now own 76% of all wealth, while the bottom 50% owns just 2%. That translates to an average purchasing power, or buying power for an individual, of $4,100 for the bottom half of the world, and $550,900 for the top earners.
The data confirms a trend of global inequality that has only increased in recent decades. The top .01%, or 520,000 adults in the world, now owns 11% of all wealth, up from 7% in 1995. The billionaires in the world own 3.5% of all wealth, as compared to .5% in 1995, according to the report.4
46%
39%
14%
1%
2010 emission levels
Where we are
Where we need to be
According to scientists, global emissions should be cut to 45% below 2010 levels by 2030 in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
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Climate change is a real and undeniable threat to our entire civilization. The effects are already visible and will be catastrophic unless we act now. Through education, innovation and adherence to our climate commitments, we can make the necessary changes to protect the planet. These changes also provide huge opportunities to modernize our infrastructure which will create new jobs and promote greater prosperity across the globe.
Emissions from developed countries were approximately 6.2% lower in 2019 than in 2010, while emissions from 70 developing countries rose by 14.4% in 2014.
Combatting the climate crisis requires us to rapidly transform the systems that propel our economy, including power generation, buildings, industry, transport, land use, and agriculture—as well as the immediate scale-up of technological carbon removal. The State of Climate Action 2021 identifies 40 indicators across key sectors that must transform to address the climate crisis, and assesses how current trends will impact how much work remains to be done by 2030 and 2050 to deliver a zero-carbon world in time. It also outlines the required shifts in supportive policies, innovations, strong institutions, leadership and social norms to unlock change.5
Therefore, we have to ask, ‘What is it about the structure of our institutions that is leading us in this direction?’
—Noam Chomsky
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“Institutions place tight constraints on what can happen. The CEO of ExxonMobil surely knows as much about global warming as you or I do, probably a lot more, at least if he reads the materials that come to him from his own scientists and engineers, and they’ve known it for 50 years… Suppose a different individual CEO came in and said, ‘Let’s tell the population the truth. Let’s tell them that we are destroying the prospects for organized human life on earth. Let’s tell them that we are going to stop doing it. We’re going to move to renewable energy, because we care about your grandchildren and ours.’ He would be out in five minutes.
That’s part of the institutional structure. If you aren’t maximizing profit and market share, you aren’t going to stand. Of course, there is a point to criticizing individuals, but the real point is that, within the system, they don’t have a lot of choices. Therefore, we have to ask, ‘What is it about the structure of our institutions that is leading us in this direction?’”1
A system is a set of things—people, cells, molecules—interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time. It may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system’s response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.6
Systems are difficult because they may not appear as “wholes”. Unlike an engine or a tornado or a human being, they may be hard to see all at once.
They are often dispersed in space, their “system-ness” experienced only over time, rendering them almost invisible. Or we may live within these systems seeing only a few individual parts, making the whole easy-to-overlook. We might call these “hidden” systems— or gossamer or ethereal or translucent systems.7
Systems thinking is a way of thinking that gives us the freedom to identify root causes of problems and see new opportunities.
Pouring half the milk into a second pail gives you two smaller amounts of milk, but dividing the cow in half does not give you two smaller cows.8
—Draper L. Kauffman, Jr.
Climate change images can evoke powerful feelings of issue salience but these do not necessarily make participants feel able to do anything about it; in fact, it may do the reverse.
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Behind the scenes, many agents of change — at all organizational levels and in regions all over the world — are struggling. At the same time, we are far from meeting the social and environmental challenges of our day; we need to unlock more collaboration and more innovation. Finding ways to address the personal challenges change makers face is therefore important not only because it matters in and of itself, but also because it has the potential to drive more effective social change.9
Instead of rallying us, climate despair asks us to give up. In a 2009 study in the UK by researchers Saffron O'Neill and Sophie Nicholson-Cole, climate-related data visualizations were presented to test subjects who were urged, in fear-based terms, to take action or else. Most of the time these appeals produced “denial, apathy, avoidance, and negative associations.”; Ultimately, the researchers concluded, "climate change images can evoke powerful feelings of issue salience but these do not necessarily make participants feel able to do anything about it; in fact, it may do the reverse.”10
Most Americans who say there’s too much economic inequality in the country think the federal government and big business should play a role in reducing inequality. Smaller but sizable shares say state governments and wealthy individuals should have a lot of responsibility in this regard.11
The way we measure what’s valuable now ignores so-called “negative externalities” like pollution. It also ignores positive externalities like investments in education, health care, and family services.
—Al Gore
It ignores the distribution of incomes and net worth. So that we have — when GDP goes up, people cheer — 2%, 3%, wow, 4%, and they think, ‘Great.’ But it is accompanied by vast increases in pollution, chronic underinvestment in public goods, the depletion of irreplaceable natural resources, and the worst inequality crisis we’ve seen in more than 100 years
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“Now, capitalism is at the base of every successful economy and it balances supply and demand. It unlocks the higher fraction of human potential, and it's not going anywhere. But it needs to be reformed, because the way we measure what's valuable now ignores so-called ‘negative externalities’ like pollution. It also ignores positive externalities like investments in education, health care, mental health care, family services. It ignores the depletion of resources like groundwater and topsoil, and the web of living species. And it ignores the distribution of incomes and net worth. So that we have — when GDP goes up, people cheer — 2%, 3%, wow, 4%, and they think, ‘Great.’ But it is accompanied by vast increases in pollution, chronic underinvestment in public goods, the depletion of irreplaceable natural resources, and the worst inequality crisis we’ve seen in more than 100 years that is threatening the future of both capitalism and democracy. So, we have to change it.”1
Such as incentives, punishments, or constraints.
The power to add, change, evolve, or adapt system structures from within.
Altering the true objectives the system works towards.
Changing the paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
Recognizing that there are no true paradigms and thus granting the power to shed or adopt new worldviews.
Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems.
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“There is a difference between nouns and verbs. Money measures something real and has real meaning (therefore people who are paid less are literally worth less). Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can “own” land. Those are just a few of the paradigmatic assumptions of our current culture, all of which have utterly dumfounded other cultures, who thought them not the least bit obvious.
Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows and everything else about systems.
But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter — they resist challenges to their paradigm harder than they resist anything else.”
In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
—Donella Meadows