Acting on Climate Change

In a closed ecosystem, action and inaction has consequences

Climate change isn't one problem. It's a chain...

Of opportunities - At any link where you find human agency there's a decision point, not a foregone conclusion.
Of threats - At every link where mother nature is in charge we find the potential for a runaway problem.

But it's also connects back on itself at multiple locations. A change in one part of the system ripples throughout.

Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and click any element for detail — the full map is easier to navigate at this size than scrolled inside a narrow column.

Systems map built and maintained in Kumu: Climate Change System Diagram

The trade-offs we make can never account for everything

Most of the opportunities to intervene in climate change appear at the front end of the system. Increasing demand across multiple domains can add heat to the system as we consume more energy. So the decisions we make in daily life all funnel into the atmospheric heating system, and when they come out the other side cascade in to our environment in sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic ways. This completely alters the options we have and we loose the decisions we might have had earlier in the cycle.

Leaving solutions to the far end of the system puts us in direct conflict with nature. While mother nature may seem benign most of the time, she has the ability to overturn all that we create.