What does zero impact on the environment really mean?
Yesterday I was at an ESG event when a delegate asked whether Net Zero meant zero people? Not being on the platform, I didn’t get a chance to answer, but I was itching to do so. So here’s my TED talk…
All life has an impact on the environment. We are only here because 3.4bn years ago, primitive clumps of bacteria called stromatolites started harnessing the sun’s energy to produce oxygen. This was arguably the biggest single impact any organism has had on the planet. Was it ‘bad’? I would say not, but then, as a keen breather of oxygen, I am prejudiced. On a smaller scale, a beaver will fell trees and dam rivers, but the other elements of this ecosystem have evolved to flourish in symbiosis with that behaviour.
Likewise everything we do as humans, including breathing, impacts on the environment. If you translate zero impact as no impact whatsoever, then that is indeed impossible, but also ridiculous. What we really mean by zero impact is to avoid disrupting the major natural processes that keep us and the rest of nature alive.
On Net Zero, the rest of life on earth is pretty much Net Zero over the short term. Animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, plants photosynthesise that carbon dioxide and release oxygen, and thus the carbon cycle remains in balance. Of course there are some geological processes which absorb or emit carbon dioxide, eg limestone formation and erosion, but to all intents and purposes you can think of nature as Net Zero.
About 200 years ago, however, we started to perform geological-scale change over that short term by digging up lots of fossilised carbon and burning it for fuel, tipping the balance of the carbon cycle. We were around for 160,000 years before our industrial carbon emissions started showing a tangible impact on the climate, so it is not human existence that leads to climate change, but our use of fossil fuels.
Nature’s sustainability is based on four basic principles – 100% renewable energy, resources flow in loops, toxins do not accumulate and symbiotic relationships (and I include predator-prey in symbiosis if you think I’m being too cuddly). These from the principles I preach in sustainability: renewable energy, circular economy, eradication of ‘forever chemicals’, and space for nature. Do those four things at scale and we will flourish.