Are you ready for Learning-by-Doing?

The problems we are blogging about are "wicked". There are no elegant solutions to be found and implemented, and our current problems are symptoms of even bigger ones.

UKSIF and NSFM are thinking of introducing more of the change agents who are grappling with these systemic issues to techniques that help people learn more quickly and/or deeply from the work they are doing. Some people will prefer to take the tools and use them with a trusted critical friend, others will prefer to work in small groups that meet regularly for an agreed period.

Some of us might want to focus on Mike Hulme’s challenge in his new book Why We Disagree About Climate Change. He believes that we should move on from seeing climate change as a wicked problem to: "us[ing] the idea of climate change to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come … as resource of the imagination … it may teach and empower us to embark on different projects from those that come easily to us".

Targets to budgets: bridging the divide between science and finance

Scientists are thinking more about how they communicate to decision-makers on climate change. Prompted by frustration over a lack of action despite compelling evidence, some are calling for a ‘common climate language’.

This is very welcome. The difficulty of translating the possibilities and probabilities of scientific projection to the certainties and time frames used by capital markets is a significant barrier to these markets fully integrating climate change.

A new study published this week may point to one way of tackling this.

The study, led by Myles Allen of Oxford University grimly finds that the world has already burned half the fossil fuels necessary to bring about a 2˚C rise in average global temperatures.

With this research, his team argues for the current range of targets and timetables on climate change to be re-framed as an available budget (‘we can only burn another x tonnes of carbon’).

This got me wondering…

...would a shift of narrative from targets to budgets help investors and their regulators understand the impact (and possibilities) of climate change?

Whilst this might be dismissed as trivial semantics, such shifts – as pointed out in this piece - may be the key to ‘greening our brains’.