About The Event
The first Conference of the Parties (COP) was held in Berlin, Germany in March 1995. The latest is COP26, Glasgow, UK, November 2021. Not much has changed since then. Consequently, Climate Change has taken on a Kafkaesque quality and morphed into the Climate Emergency.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
Albert Einstein
Underlying causes stem from business-as-usual decision-making, actions and reporting at national, regional, industrial, or financial level that lacks ‘environmental’ return on investment to inform better decisions. As a result of the persistent failure of decision makers to move the narrative from diagnosing the problems and offering linear fragmented answers, there is now a less than five per cent chance of keeping temperatures well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and less than one per cent chance of reaching the 1.5°C target set by the IPCC and embedded within 2015 Paris Agreement.
“Theoretical work can spin-off under its own momentum reflecting little of the empirical world.”
Elinor Ostrom, 1990
The remedy is to offer harmonised systemic integrated solutions, to take a holistic system view of the relationships among the fragmented parts of organisations, economies, communities, and the natural environment to account for the effects of multiple interacting investment, organisational, environmental, governance and social ecosystems. To take account of feedback loops to reduce pressure on ecosystem services, the inflow of raw material, and absorption of outflow that it will be useful in various ways – for environmental management, biodiversity, community well-being and economic management. How thinking in three-dimensions can promote the tackling of multiple challenges of mankind’s impact upon the biosphere simultaneously.
“Sometimes it’s not about things but the relationship between things.”
Christopher Gleadle, 2015
Accordingly, in this event we bring together leading practitioners and academics to discuss how education has an opportunity to drive immediate positive climate impact through developing deeper systems thinking within all subjects. And, moving this discussion forward into the real world and linking to the sphere of transport and how balanced system approaches between diverse technologies and behaviour can rapidly decarbonise transport and thus all that relies upon mass movement in a global community.