Tonight at the Green Drink at Café Opera in Stockholm, we had an excellent presentation by Johan Rockström, the head of Stockholm Environment Institute. He is together with his team participating in the IPCC work and he is probably the most influential academic environmentalist from the Nordics right now.
He gave a very alarming picture of the world based on the latest, “post IPCC” research. It was really the kind of alarm clock which is needed again and again in order to create the sense of urgency which is needed to really inspire change.
Johan talked about the earthly resilience and how planet earth has absorbed a lot of the changes in CO2 levels as well as in other parameters, but that we are now approaching the tipping points where change start to happen extremely fast. He gave a number of observed examples of this happening already. E g the very rapid melting of the arctic ice cap which is happening right now.
He also talked about the planetary boundaries we need to start to understand for a number of critical variables, not just for CO2. The challenge related to water or ecosystems break-down is as big but less talked about right now.
But, after having seen some of these presentations, I felt I was missing something. The presentation was stirring up a lot of emotions and questions, but then it really left us without any hints on what to do. And that is the missing piece. We are beyond the stage now when it is sufficient to show us something needs to be done. There are so many organisations and individuals that have accepted this already that we need to take the next step of actually making calculations on future scenarios relevant to companies, so they see clearly how their business will be impacted and what options they have for acting now, and what the payoff will be.
This is something I realize that most organisations actually are looking for – the data needed for moving from awareness to action based on real business cases, although of course based on some assumptions.
Together with a team we have started to build this kind of data and presentation. It will exciting to see how it is received.
