Race to flatten another curve — covid lessons

Peter du ToitI'm the founder of FutureWork IQ where I spend my time assisting businesses to improve their climate literacy so as to understand the projected impacts from the expanding climate crisis and how to adapt their workplaces in the face of these impacts.

When the pandemic struck our response was basically divided into two phases:

1) Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPI’s) designed to flatten and slow the infection curve to prevent healthcare systems from collapsing which would increase mortality substantially and buying enough time to

2) Develop, manufacture and distribute vaccines to help reach population immunity enabling the easing of NPI restrictions. Again with the goal of preventing healthcare collapse and the resulting mortality.

This was very disruptive to life as we knew it.

Another major global crisis basically requires the same general two phase approach:

1) Immediate carbon reduction (carbon lockdowns if you will) to flatten and then slow the carbon emission curve to avoid irreversible plantery heating resulting in ecological collapse and catastrophic mortality and to buy enough time to

2) Develop, manufacture and distribute technologies to decouple the global economy from the need to burn fossil fuels with the goal to create deep system wide carbon emissions reductions to prevent ecological collapse and resulting catastrophic mortality.

This response will again create very serious disruption to life as we knew it.

Just as before the pandemic there were companies that had already embraced ways of working that enabled them to experience minimal disruption, so too now putting a strategy in place to decouple your business from fossil fuels will mean experiencing less disruption when the first phase, carbon lockdowns, arrive.

How far are you down this path?