https://www.haultail.com/news-article/16797/in-search-of-leverage-which-climate-actions-do-really-matter

1. IN SEARCH OF LEVERAGE: WHICH
CLIMATE ACTIONS DO REALLY
MATTER?
27 Feb 2019
OnMarch 21, 1995, biologists hired by the U.S. National Park Service
released 14 grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park. It was an attempt
at addressing a problem that had steadily deteriorated the park’s
ecosystem since the 1920s: the overpopulation of elks. The scientists
predicted that by reintroducing an apex predator they could trigger a ​trophic
cascade ​— a domino effect that causes the recovery of individual species
in an ecosystem, one by one, based on each species’ rank in the food web.
In the months and years following the release, the biologists observed with
suspense how their rewilding effort was affecting the park’s flora and fauna.
What they discovered was astounding. In line with their predictions, the
wolves started to prey on elk, reducing the local elk population. This

2. allowed aspen and willow trees to recover, providing food and construction
material for beavers. When those beavers multiplied and started to build
dams, they created new habitat for fish. Plant life along river banks began
to thrive, reducing soil erosion. The hunting patterns of wolves also meant
that carrion became available throughout the year, a blessing for ravens
and bears. In short, the experiment was a resounding success and became
the most celebrated ecological intervention in history.
Restoring an ecosystem of the size and complexity of a national park could
be enormously time consuming and costly. Instead, it was accomplished
with a simple measure: the reintroduction of an animal sitting on top of the
food chain. There are other examples of relatively simple actions that have
generated outsize impacts:
● 30 years ago, the United Nations adopted the ​Montreal Protocol,​a document
of only 49 pages that saved the Earth’s ozone layer and avoided an estimated
250 million cases of skin cancer.
● In 2016, the two largest retailers in Switzerland started charging five cents for
grocery bags made of plastic, causing the use of these bags — previously
thought to be indispensable — to drop by a staggering 80%.
● When Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, gave his famous
Tragedy of the Horizon ​speech in 2015, he sent shock waves through the
financial industry and fundamentally changed how corporate executives
thought about climate change.
Why could these small actions trigger such wide-ranging effects? Because
they had ​leverage in driving systems change.
Leverage is powerful. Pull on the right lever and you will change the course
of history. Yet leverage is also elusive — difficult to find and engage,
particularly for such complex problems as global warming. ​In Search of
Leverage​is a new ​Medium​publication that will explore a seemingly trivial
but surprisingly difficult question: ​In our effort to curb climate change,
what should we focus on?

3. Leverage amplifies a force. It multiplies the effort you put in to produce a
higher output. As children, we experienced leverage on the playground
when playing with shovels and seesaws. As adults, we benefit from
leverage through the mortgage we borrow to buy a house, the device we
use to open a can, the socially-connected friend who introduces us to
interesting strangers, and the workout routine that not only makes us fitter
but also allows us to sleep and concentrate better. Leverage is so
commonplace that most of us don’t even notice when it’s present.
Leverage is about efficiency — engaging it means getting better results
without increasing the effort. Utilizing leverage is therefore crucial for
anybody pursuing a goal with limited resources. Political will, public
attention spans, research agendas, social capital, and fiscal
budgets — these resources are critical in our fight against climate change,
and they are scarce. So we need to make our actions count.
The climate community often fails to engage leverage when analyzing
issues or proposing measures. Some climate advocates love checklists of
individual actions such as insulating homes, installing solar panels, and
recycling waste, but they fail to recognize that individual behavior and
lifestyle changes alone will not solve the collective action problem that is
climate change. Others call for tighter fuel efficiency standards in vehicles,
not realizing that better fuel economy makes driving cheaper and leads to
even more driving — a phenomenon known as the ​rebound effect.​Those
advocating a carbon tax as the golden path to sustainability falsely believe
that humans are rational creatures who make purchase decisions solely
based on price signals. After studying the use of leverage in our effort to
stem global warming, researchers at Leuphana University in Germany
concluded:
Many sustainability interventions target highly tangible, but essentially weak,
leverage points, using interventions that are easy but have limited potential for
transformational change.

4. Appreciating leverage means questioning the mindsets and paradigms that
form the bedrock of human civilization. It means paying attention to the
mental models we use to make sense of the world and find meaning and
belonging. It means questioning the goals, structures, and rules we set for
our systems and how we design the flow of information and the distribution
of power.
Leverage is the reason why I admire Elon Musk for making sustainability
cool. It’s why I was excited when Pope Francis added his encyclical
Laudato si’​to the reading list of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics around the
world. It’s why, in 2015, I was hopeful that COP21 would produce a strong
multilateral climate treaty— and why I was disappointed by the paltriness of
the ​Paris Agreement.​It’s also why I’m concerned that climate change is
virtually absent from contemporary art.
Identifying leverage is hard. Engaging it is even harder. The first challenge
lies in developing a ​conceptual understanding ​of the elements,
relationships, and dynamics that characterize a system of interest and an
intuitive feeling ​for how the system behaves over time. Most systems
relevant to climate change are complex and adaptive. They change
constantly in response to internal pressures and external influences,
self-organizing based on a mysterious set of rules. They follow a
cause-and-effect logic that reveals itself only in hindsight and after scrutiny
of the relationships and feedback loops that define their internal dynamics.
Economies, immune systems, brains, and biotopes are all complex
adaptive systems, as are social constructs such as nation-states, families,
and companies. Finding leverage points in a complex adaptive system
requires careful study and thoughtful experimentation.
After identifying leverage points, the next challenge is to figure out how to
act upon them. It’s easy to recognize behavior change, investment, and
technological innovation as levers — as the IPCC’s 1.5 °C special report

5. does — but it is difficult to find out exactly how to act upon them. How do
we make the world adopt a diet that can feed 10 billion people without
wrecking the planet? How do we triple global investment in renewable
energy? How do we accelerate the electrification of transport when electric
vehicle uptake remains insignificantly low? Understanding how to pull on
levers in a way that triggers rapid and tangible systems change is the
toughest challenge for anyone trying to stem climate change.
The quest for leverage will take us deep into the theory and practice of
systems thinking. It will animate us to reflect on abstract concepts such as
time, identity, and values. It will encourage us to review how we engage
language, policy, and culture in service of climate action. It will force us to
draw from a vast range of disciplines such as psychology, political science,
economics, engineering, business, and arts. It will make us explore how we
can use exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D
printing, virtual reality, and synthetic biology to understand and manipulate
systems.
Expecting to stumble upon one magic solution that will solve all our
problems — like those grey wolves in Yellowstone National
Park — would be naive. But in our desperation to make tangible progress
in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we have lost focus. Systems theory
tells us that some actions are more powerful than others in driving change,
so we know that leverage exists. We need to start looking for it again.