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My first role in Sustainability, albeit unpaid, was as a Voluntary Officer at the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, leading practical conservation tasks. Most of the other staff and volunteers came from an ecological background, so as an engineer, I learnt loads about ecology – the need for diversity, the importance of transition zones between habitats and the need to prevent habitats fragmenting as each species needed a critical size and quality to survive/thrive in. Once that critical size/quality is lost, the species disappear.

The latter sprang to mind as I listened to Emily Grubert on David Robert’s Volts podcast earlier this month. Grubert has been investigating the ‘minimum viable scale’ of the fossil fuel industry and how this might lead to a bumpy ride through the transition. Rather than fade away gradually, parts of the old system will simply fall off a cliff as they shrink below viability. Grubert uses the example of four fuel stations at one road intersection – we might assume that as demand shrinks they would neatly shut down one at a time, but in reality it is more likely that all four would disappear all of a sudden, leaving those with internal combustion engine vehicles stranded for fuel. From plenty to nothing in short order.

My third role in Sustainability was based on Teesside which had been dominated by two huge petrochemical complexes owned at their peak by ICI. Digby Jones of ICI described the sites as ‘chemical pork butchery’ – crude oil was pumped ashore and converted into a whole cascade of products with virtually no ‘waste’. As ICI split up and divested the constituent plants in the mid 1990s, the tight symbiosis between the plants was lost and holes started appearing in the matrix. I arrived in 2000 as this process was accelerating, the fragmentation becoming a contagion.

This was, of course long before the Climate Change Act (2008) or the Government’s Net Zero Target (2019) which now get blamed for all and any industrial closures – as per the last of the Teesside ICI petrochemical plants now under threat in the news today. But as our uptake of EVs, heat pumps and renewable energy systems start to bite into fossil fuel demand, we will start to see a Jenga type effect – some parts of the puzzle can be removed without immediate effect, but the cumulative impact will eventually bring the whole thing tumbling down.

How should organisations hedge against such unexpected cliffs in their supply chain? Here are some first steps:

1. Do a risk assessment of the sudden loss of fossil fuel-based dependencies
2. Get those risks recorded in your official risk register so the following steps are integrated into normal business process, not just a coffee break discussion in the Sustainability department
3. Develop mitigation plans – eg is it now time to go all in for EVs?
4. Develop contingency plans – what would you do if any of these things happen suddenly?

Overall, the simplistic answer is to navigate a canny path between first mover and laggard and not get left stranded like a VHS user in an age of streaming – do you remember the last time you rewound a tape?