Barriers to Net Zero - Silos

15 March 2023

At Aether we have developed 10 observations on the barriers to society meeting its obligations to mitigate the impacts of human-influenced climate change. We aim to discuss and provide answers to these problems and point to where connections need to be made between government policy and private sector action. Our observations are a series of intertwined issues with the system we operate in. There is no hierarchy to these issues, but we have framed them between the organisational structures we operate in such as time, geography, and data and the human responses to these structures such as polarised thought, fear and learned helplessness.


The starting point to our white paper is an education system that celebrates specialists and linear thinking and derides the generalist. We see commentators decree the need for ‘whole system thinking’ as the answer to net zero. But in an education system that forces specialist thinking from a young age combined with a brain that’s success has evolved from logic and order, unilateral ‘whole system thinking’ is a fallacy.

Barriers-To-Net-Zero-1-silos.pngDownload: Barriers-To-Net-Zero-v3-part-1-silos.pdf

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