22: Sustainable to Regenerative

Anna-Marie Slot:
Hello, I'm Anna-Marie Slot, Global ESG and Sustainability Partner here at as Ashurst. Thank you for joining me for another one of our 30 for Net Zero 30 podcasts, where I've been speaking with champions across the globe about real actions to take now to achieve 2030 goals. Today, I'm super excited to be joined by Michael Pawlyn, founder and director of Exploration Architecture, a company that focuses on high performance buildings and solutions for the circular economy. Thank you so much, Michael, for joining us today, and I really enjoyed your TED Talk that's out there, for anyone who wants to watch a fascinating TED Talk. Maybe you could start off with just a little bit of background around yourself, how you came to give your talk, maybe, and the work that you're doing.

Michael Pawlyn:
Sure. Well, thanks very much for involving me and thanks for that introduction. So, as you said, I'm an architect, I'm also a consultant, and increasingly advising organisations on how to transform from sustainable to regenerative, and maybe we can come on to discussing the difference between those. I also co-founded something called Architects Declare a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency, which grew into Built Environment Declares, so including a wide range of disciplines, and then I wrote a co-authored book with Sarah Ichioka that came out at the end of last year that's called Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency, and the TED Talk I gave, and really a lot of my focus of interest, is on biologically-inspired design approaches. The reason I think those are so important is because I feel it's becoming more and more clear now that the challenge for humanity, really, is to try and integrate everything we do into the broader web of life, and, given that urgent challenge, there's a huge amount that we can learn from the way that the natural world works at a functional and systemic level.

Anna-Marie Slot:
So you've been a little busy in the last few months. I guess, fascinating that you had all these different aspects going and I think most people realise what a crucial and gigantic aspect built environment is to the overall topic of how we live on this planet. You've obviously been very active for a very long time. Have you been seeing any shift in the last 18 to 24 months about how the rest of the world is engaging on this?

Michael Pawlyn:
Yeah, I have, and in various of your episodes, you've commented on the really substantial shift towards zero carbon, and that's great. The other really important shift that I've seen is the increasing use of the term "regenerative", and I think, for those people who've been in the field of sustainability for a long time, there's been a growing feeling that conventional approaches to sustainability have not got us where we need to be. That really became clear to me with the October 2018 IPCC report.

Michael Pawlyn:
For me, there are three distinct differences between sustainable and regenerative. So firstly, sustainability has largely been about mitigating negatives, and the implication is that the best we can hope to achieve is to be 100% less bad, and actually, we need to go beyond that into the realms of having a net positive impact. The other thing is that sustainability has tended to be rather mechanistic, and actually we need a much more systemic approach. And then thirdly, sustainability tended to just be about humans, and we actually need to acknowledge that we are completely dependent on ecosystems for our wellbeing and long-term sustainability as a species.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Fair points, and I think really interesting is that acknowledgement that you're seeing and now all these task forces with a wider group of people talking about biodiversity, talking about the role of nature. I think, historically, that was always something that people thought was nice, "It's nice that we take a walk in the woods sometimes," and not really realising, actually, we need the woods.

Michael Pawlyn:
Yeah. I agree. There was a time when biodiversity was really just regarded as trying to conserve one or two iconic species, and then that broadened into trying to conserve really valuable habitats. I think the pandemic has actually shifted our thinking quite substantially and it's made us realise how interconnected we are, not just with humans, but it did show that we're only safe when we're all safe. Also, I think it's encouraged us to think much more carefully about our relationship with the rest of the living world, because if we keep treating nature as something to be plundered for resources, we are going to experience more frequent and potentially more serious pandemics. I hope that... and this is something that my co-author Sarah and I wrote in our book, I hope that in time the pandemic will be seen as a quite significant turning point where we realised that it was the end of what we call human exceptionalism, the idea that somehow we can exist outside the laws of physics and biology, which is always nonsense, but we've struggled to accept that for quite a long time.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Yeah, it's this "dominion over" idea that was really running the show for a long time, and I think that's falling apart in lots of different ways, through lots of different lenses when you look at things that are going on throughout society. Really interesting is that you and I were talking earlier about the rights of nature and how that is now becoming something that people are talking about, and it is this much more big picture, look at the whole system and understand that all of these aspects need to be recognised. Are you seeing people engaging with you on those kinds of conversations?

Michael Pawlyn:
They are, but I think we've still got a long way to go. So the progress on zero carbon is great, but sometimes I worry that could occlude other really essential aspects. So, for instance, just to take one example, there's really very little discussion at the moment about the effects of toxins on the environment, and if you look at what's happened to sperm counts in Western males, it's dropped by something like 60% in the last 50 years. So far, it looks like a linear trend, and if it carries on as it is, we'll be sterile as a species long before we get to zero carbon, and yet no one's talking about it... well, hardly anyone, and a lot of that comes down to the way we make things.

Michael Pawlyn:
So you're probably familiar with the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, and what really came across in that book, which was written by a chemist and an architect, was that the way we go about making things really represents sloppy chemistry, because we release all sorts of things into the environment that we shouldn't do, and we often use the wrong materials. We really need an urgent rethink on that, and similarly in buildings, it's not often discussed, but in fires, far more people die from inhaling toxic fumes than from the direct effect of flames. I think what we need to do is completely design out toxins, so that includes designing out most fire retardants, and that's going to lead to much greater use of sprinklers in buildings, but I think that would be a much safer approach.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Interesting. Yeah, I think it is that point... hopefully, we're getting to a point where people are thinking not just, "What can I do? How can I tweak what I'm doing now to get to net zero or net negative?" But if I were starting today and I stepped back and I looked at the whole system fresh, how would I deliver what I'm trying to deliver through what I'm doing?

Michael Pawlyn:
Yeah, exactly, and those two words you used, "whole system", those are crucial because what we really need to do better is integrated thinking.

Anna-Marie Slot:
And so maybe, Michael, if you could give some examples of what that looks like in real practise.

Michael Pawlyn:
Yeah, sure. I can give you an example at a national level and then a more construction or built environment-specific one. So we're in a particularly difficult situation at the moment with the Ukraine war and so on, and in 2021, the UK spent £4 billion on Russian oil and is currently planning to spend £27 billion on expanding the road network. So let's look at those figures and think about, well, maybe there's a better integrated way of approaching this. So for £3 billion a year, we could afford to make every bus fare in the UK free, which would mean we would massively reduce congestion, we'd reduce the cost of living crisis, and we wouldn't need to spend that £27 billion on expanding the road network. We could instead spend that £27 billion on upgrading the buildings in the UK, the draughtiest and amongst the coldest in Europe. We could start with those most suffering from fuel poverty.

Michael Pawlyn:
So taken in a more integrated way, we could actually tackle climate change, the cost of living crisis, congestion, transport, fuel poverty, as well as cutting off 4 billion that was going to Vladimir Putin. That's the benefit of integrated approaches. To take a more specific one from the built environment, there's a lot of talk now about the idea of the 15 minute city, and the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has been pushing this. The idea with a 15 minute city is that if you plan or refurbish a better city so that people can access everything they need, in terms of weekly amenities, within a 15 minute walk or cycle, then you massively reduce the need for private cars, you can release more urban space for green spaces, and it can actually save a lot of money. So that really is transformative in terms of people's wellbeing, their social interactions, and it would create a much better quality of life with lower resource use and lower overall cost.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Yeah, and you would think that lower overall cost is such a win for so many people within the structure, right?

Michael Pawlyn:
Well, yeah, you would, but people still seem to struggle with the idea of integrated thinking. I mean, another example is hospital design. Hospitals are often built to the lowest capital cost and that's a disaster, because it then costs more to treat people, and if you look at an example, there was a fantastic study of a hospital in the U.S. where there was one particular ward and everyone was recovering from the same operation. Half the beds had a view to a blank brick wall on the other side of the street; the other half of the beds had a view of a green space. The people with the view of nature recovered 8% more quickly and with half the amount of pain-relieving drugs than the people with the view of the blank brick wall.

Michael Pawlyn:
Imagine the economic benefits of treating everyone in hospital 8% more quickly with 50% less drugs yeah. That should have become standard practise for hospital design and that's what we need to get to: a more integrated and holistic and longer-term view on delivering the maximum value for the minimum long-term cost, not the minimum short-term cost.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Yeah, and phrased in that way, who would get pushback from, "Hi, I'd like to save 8% on our costs today. Can we implement it?" And energy efficiency, I think you mentioned the draftiness of the English building stock... energy efficiency alone is huge savings, not in the immediate month that it's costing you to put in everything in, but when you look in the right timeframe...

Michael Pawlyn:
Absolutely, and that can be done so much more quickly than building a new nuclear power station.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Yeah. So on that, let's move to action. What about an action? Where do you think the... Who needs to really focus in in the next year or two? Because obviously, everything we do now is cumulative to what we get back from it in the future. What do you think?

Michael Pawlyn:
I think we need a richer debate about how change happens and I think it's naive to think that if we just keep going towards zero carbon, we'll get there, because we need much more than that. I also think we need a debate about the role of technology. So there are plenty of people at the moment who would like to think, or like us to think, that technology has all the answers, and it does have some of the answers, but the outcome of a particular technology depends a lot on the mindset behind it. So if we take an example like 3D printing, based on the current economic system, 3D printing could well increase resource consumption and see us drowning in a ton of consumerist crap. However if 3D printing was driven by a regenerative mindset, it could be really transformative, because it would allow us to use the right raw materials assembled in a way that allows near perfect circular stewardship, and it would allow us to get closer to the remarkable efficiency of biological structures, quite possibly achieving factor 10 or even factor 100 savings in resource use.

Michael Pawlyn:
It's that mindset level that I think we really need the movement on, and that's what Sarah and I wrote about in our book. Each chapter describes a really fundamental shift that we need to bring about if we are to make this overall shift from a sustainable mindset to a regenerative one. Most of what we've been doing in sustainability is still relevant, but we need to transcend and include that with a broader and more systemic set of perspectives.

Anna-Marie Slot:
No, definitely, and so I'm going to ask you the question of what have you been up to personally in terms of your own commitments? I think in some ways maybe writing a book and being super active on the business front is very helpful to it, but just anything else that you have in your back pocket?

Michael Pawlyn:
Sure. Well, I'll give you two things I'm going to be working on over the next 12 months. One is I'm working on a scheme with a small developer and that is aiming to be planet positive, so sequestering more carbon than it releases, creating more habitats for biodiversity than currently exist, and really trying to be net positive across the board.

Michael Pawlyn:
The other thing is that I'm going to be continuing the work that I've been involved with in Architects Declare and Built Environment Declares, trying to build a broad coalition of Declare organisations and local authorities so that we can bring about a tipping point, because what has been very frustrating for people like yourself and me working in this area for a long time is that we've actually had all the solutions we need for a long time. The problem really is with the persistent current economic system, which is really deeply flawed, and I'm not calling for an end to capitalism, I'm calling for a form of economics that can flourish within planetary limits. I'm thinking particularly of examples like Kate Raworth's doughnut economics.

Michael Pawyln:
In local authorities, I read recently that 93% of the UK population is now living in a local authority that has declared a climate emergency, and we've had a whole plethora of other organisations declaring a climate emergency and I'm pretty sure that a lot of them will have arrived at similar conclusions, which is that there's only so much we can do to get our own houses in order as sectors or organisations or whatever. What we really need is higher level systems change. We need to redirect the purpose of the economy so it's not just about endless growth, but it is... I believe, and Sarah and I wrote about this in our chapter on growth, a much more suitable purpose for the economy would be the maximisation of planetary health, and, as you may know, planetary health is distinct from global health in that it acknowledges that our health as humans is inseparable from the health of the broader systems on which we depend.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Mm, yeah. So in the last moments here, one takeaway for our listeners who've joined us today, what should they go away from this podcast thinking as they head back into their working day?

Michael Pawlyn:
Sure. I'd like to encourage your listeners to think about how they can maximise their agency, because we have had a problem, particularly in the built environment, of professionals minimising their agency, thinking, "Oh, well, I'm only an architect. There's only so much I can do unless I have a really ambitious client," and sometimes big client organisations say, "Well, we're beholden to our shareholders, so there's not much we can do." The problem with that is that it's kind of contagious. When we minimise our own agency, we encourage others to minimise theirs, but the good thing is that if we flip that, I'm absolutely convinced that that positively contagious effect could spread.

Michael Pawlyn:
It's also useful, I think, to consider where you can be most effective. So there's someone called Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, she's a biologist, a policy expert, and a podcast host, and she encourages people to think in terms of a Venn diagram. Three circles: what are you good at? What do you enjoy? And what is the work that needs to be done? And if you can find that sweet spot, then that's likely to be where you can be most effective.

Michael Pawlyn:
Once you've done that, I think it's worth taking note of Naomi Klein's advice. When she's asked, "What can I do as an individual?" Her response is, "Stop thinking of yourself as an individual," because you can achieve so much more if you collaborate with others. If you're in a company, look to how you can transform your company. If you're senior in a company, look to how you can transform your institution. If you're the head of an institution, look to how you can team up with other institutions to bring about the kind of necessary systems change we need. Finally, I'd really encourage people to try to find unifying ways of communicating and collaborating. I find the constant culture wars and division that some populists engage in really very tiresome and unhelpful and we've got to get over that. We've all got to get on board with a really urgent situation.

Anna-Marie Slot:
Excellent advice. Take what you're good at, think about how that matters, and get moving. So thanks so much, Michael. I really appreciate you joining us today. And for those of you looking for something to read over the weekend, why don't you pick up Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn.

Michael Pawlyn:
Thank you.