Our vision for a triple transition in a critical decade
Accelar’s Chris Fry and Charlene Baker joined a panel of experts to contribute to an analysis of the themes that will define the 2020s, a critical decade for achieving the climate transition. Some excerpts are shared below and the full article is available from the Environment Analyst website.
Accelar believes that following the year of realisation in 2019, "2020 should mark the start of a decade defined by a triple transition - not only in terms of the importance of these issues in their own right - but also the implications and opportunities across the economy, with the ‘green jobs revolution’ mooted many times during last year’s general election campaign." First, and accelerating most rapidly, according to Fry, is the transition to net zero carbon. But alongside that momentum should also build in the transition towards biodiversity recovery and finally in a transition to much greater climate resilience.
"To avoid being stuck on the back foot, businesses, the public sector as well as countries, towns and cities will need to at least recalibrate and perhaps reimagine their strategies. Some are and will go even further to inspire and drive deep change," he qualifies.
"To be successful in the medium term through these transitions, all sectors will need to harness the most useful digital technologies and innovations along the way. Whilst a key sustainability enabler, the other side of the smart coin is disruption to business models that is likely to affect many more products and services, and some entire industries."
Another critical enabler of the triple transition is finance, more specifically green finance which "is set not just to mature but to start to dominate," Fry suggests. "Significantly greater adoption and some broadening of disclosure of ESG factors to investors over the last decade provides a platform for this."
“The UK’s ambition and approach for the 2020s is now enshrined in the Green Finance Strategy launched in 2019. This created the new Green Finance Institute which in its first coalition has quickly honed in on how financial innovations such as green mortgages can accelerate the crucial building energy efficiency market which has been a highly problematic policy area. Whilst fully embedding sustainability and attracting capital towards it in the complex financial markets has been relatively slow up to now, rapid change is expected.”
Fry also underlines the importance of physical infrastructure to the speed of the carbon, biodiversity and resilience transitions. "Infrastructure policy and investment will also be under great scrutiny and many programmes will also need to be redefined or at least recalibrated in 2020 so as to avoid locking in new decisions that quickly become sub-optimal or even redundant, for example as energy and mobility systems are transformed over the next three decades," he states.
From strategy consultancy Accelar’s recent project experience (having been established only six months ago with a specific remit to focus on supporting the clean growth transition), Fry is finding that
“clients are generally recognising the urgency of the triple transition and are seeking a deeper understanding of the relevance to their own activities, assets and places. This is driving an appetite for data insights and operational solutions that whilst not necessarily new, are being combined or applied in new ways in new contexts".
In terms of the infrastructure opportunities in 2020 more broadly, Accelar’s Charlene Baker says the industry will be hoping that the National Infrastructure and (north-south) Rebalancing toolkit to be released in March, alongside the Chancellor’s budget, will set out credible plans for an "infrastructure revolution".
UK flood management is an area of infrastructure policy where extensive rethinking has already taken place in the context of a changing climate and the government’s new Flood and Coastal Risk Management Strategy is due in the Spring. Fry observes that flooding was long seen as a problem for governments to try to fund and engineers to try to solve, largely through major flood defence infrastructure projects. "But if the draft strategy, successes in natural flood management and the new code of practice to help to unlock the market for property level flood resilience are anything to go by, a multi-pronged approach to flood resilience should now be here to stay," he suggests.
