I’m not a big fan of board games. I hate sitting waiting for my turn at Scrabble, watching all the other players inadvertantly block my 100+ point word, and then my 50 point back up, and so on, til I’m down to a measly 10 pointer. But the rest of my family love them, so I come under massive pressure to stop being so grumpy and join in.

When I was a teenager, I did play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my mates, which is quite different as your band of misfits (the characters, not us) work together against the challenges the game throws at you. This collaborative model has been adopted by some modern board games, such as Pandemic, where your characters work together to stop, um, a pandemic which spreads around the world via a clever ratcheting mechanism in the game design.

I sometimes think about this when following the political discourse on tackling climate change. The UK has undoubtedly moved ahead of the pack in decarbonisation and many (typically on the right) see this as an excuse to ease up, rather than consolidate and build our lead. Instead they warn against the “headlong rush to Net Zero” (as if that was a bad thing and was actually happening) and then quote out of date statistics about China’s investment in coal.

But climate change isn’t a competition against other countries – it’s not like a bike race where a competitor can break away from the peloton, establish an unassailable lead, then soft pedal over the line, arms aloft. As with D&D and Pandemic, we are playing together against the rising carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, with each character able to offer something slightly different to the quest. Every tonne of GHGs the UK avoids emitting is a tonne less in the atmosphere capturing heat, which improves the future just that teensiest little bit for everyone in the world. It is also an act of leadership which is seen around the world, inspiring/shaming others to act. If we slow down, why wouldn’t anyone else?

This narrative of ‘we’ve done our bit, what about everybody else’ is not only dangerous for the planet, but is politically hazardous – last year, Rishi Sunak’s personal ratings fell when he announced a dilution of Net Zero policies – and never recovered, which is why he is now ex-Prime Minister of the UK.

Competition has its place though and can be harnessed to great effect. When I was part of the team that got my city of Newcastle to the top of Forum for the Future’s Sustainability rankings in 2009, my immediate worry was that others would see it as a job done and sit back. To my pleasant surprise, the ‘win’ galvanised the team, brought plenty of new collaborators out of the woodwork, and the next year we beat the traditionally green cities such as Brighton and Bristol by an even wider margin (unfortunately that was the last year the ranking was published).

In business, I remember Steve Jobs seeing Apple propping up the bottom of a Greenpeace ranking of electronics companies and suddenly launching a massive Sustainability programme (which has its limitations, but is far better than some of its closest rivals). Gamification is used to great effect within businesses to encourage Sustainability action – check out my interview with Paula Owen on the pod. But business play nicely too, with another guest on the pod, Alex Roberts, explained that construction companies collaborate with their competitors to get their supply chain in shape for the future – all that combined buying power makes a real difference.

So the challenge is knowing when to compete and when to collaborate, but the bottom line is that at the end of the day either everybody wins or everybody loses. The choice is ours.