The latest from the lab

We all know that if we carry along our current trajectory, we won’t successfully tackle the polycrisis. The interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss and social injustice require a huge shift in the way we live. It requires us to change the unsustainable systems that govern our everyday – such as our energy, transport and food systems. These changes need a tremendous amount of funding, yet one of the underlying issues of the polycrisis is a flawed financial and economic system. So, the question is: what do we do now?

“People often think radical change is difficult and will never happen. It can happen. Look at history: radical change happened. But the question is how.” – Johan Schot, founder of the DT Lab, speaking at Engagement Week 2024. These words get to the heart of what the Deep Transitions Lab is doing. We spend time understanding how change has happened in order to inspire change towards a sustainable future. Our experiment, learning and research programme is geared towards testing, understanding and disseminating our findings.

The urgent need for systemic change to address the global crises is clear. With the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and rising inequalities becoming more interconnected, unprecedented investments are required to drive long-term systemic solutions. The power and role of capital in addressing these crises are equally evident—transformative change cannot happen without significant financial resources. However, there is a critical gap in how public and private investments coordinate and align. All too often, investors operate in silos, supporting system optimisation rather than system change. To achieve the needed transformation, a strategic redirection of financial resources is needed, with coordinated and well-aligned investments that enable the deep, systemic changes required to build a sustainable, equitable future.

Professor Johan Schot, the academic director and founder of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) and the Deep Transitions Lab, is at the forefront of pioneering systemic change through collaborative efforts. In this insightful interview, Schot delves into the importance of uniting public and private investors to tackle global ecological and social challenges. He emphasises the need for a common narrative and shared experiences to foster effective partnerships and scaling of transformative practices. Highlighting the important role of the upcoming Engagement Week, themed ‘Scaling Experimentation’, Schot discusses how aligning public and private investments, building robust networks, and leveraging academic insights can drive the systemic transformation necessary for a sustainable future.

Grounded in academic research, the learning programme aims to cultivate mutual understanding and build capabilities to guide the practical application of Transformative Investment. It will help build a community of practice of frontrunners in the investment sector and maximise the lab’s transformative potential by mobilising a variety of actors through outreach and engagement.

Creating true systems change means working collaboratively with greater collective action, coordination and co-learning. This project between the Deep Transitions Lab (DT Lab) and the TransCap Initiative (TCI) was born from the intention to learn from each other and to inform and strengthen each other’s work by identifying commonalities and differences, building bridges between our respective conceptual foundations and sharing lessons learned from our efforts to bring theory into practice.

Produced from renewable electricity, green hydrogen is a promising solution to contribute towards and even accelerate the energy transition. There’s increasing media attention on this source of energy as governments and organisations continue to promote hydrogen development. And in the midst of this keen focus, many Global South countries have launched hydrogen strategies. A new report, “Green Hydrogen in the Global South: opportunities and challenges” by Stefan Gevaert, Lioba Pause, Eric Cezne, Amanda-Leigh O’Connell, Kei Otsuki explores many urgent questions as hydrogen projects across the globe get underway. 

The Deep Transitions Lab is a platform to accelerate systems change. We need a solution to create the deep, fundamental societal transformations that are desperately needed in our time of the climate crisis and ever-growing inequality. But to finance system change investors need sound science, tools and practices to gear investments towards long-term and create a resilient portfolio.

To tackle the tri-fold crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and inequality, we must embrace systems change and transform the way we invest. But how do we finance transformative change? The Deep Transitions Lab is on a mission to make this a reality. In November 2022, the Deep Transitions team alongside a cohort of 16 public and private investors from around the world published a Transformative Investment Philosophy. This proposed new principles, tools and metrics for financing long-term system change and a deep transition towards sustainability. Now Deep Transitions researchers have published the new paper “Transformative Investment: New Rules for Investing in Sustainability Transitions” by Caetano Penna, Johan Schot, and Ed Steinmueller, which critically analyses the current financial regime and its implications for sustainability transitions. The paper proposes a new set of rules grounded in socio-technical sustainability transition theory and the recent development of a theory of deep transitions. The aim? To guide transformative investments towards achieving both monetary and non-monetary value, such as societal and ecological resilience.

Gathering in Tartu (Estonia) in September, teams from Britain, the Netherlands and Estonia began a 3-day Deep Transitions workshop on assessing and measuring systems change. The sessions aimed to develop increased knowledge on indicators for transformative change, generate ideas for funding proposals and exchange knowledge between teams, establishing closer ties and exploring opportunities for future collaboration. The results of the workshop will feed into DT research and the recently-opened lab.

The Deep Transitions team and partners gathered to officially open the Deep Transitions Lab. This was an exciting occasion that brought together years of work and our overarching vision. The lab aims to shift investment away from innovations that reinforce our current unsustainable systems and instead, redirect investment towards multiple systems change. Ultimately, trying to help the world develop according to just and sustainable principles.

The future promises to be unpredictable, complex and volatile. Yet many quantitative models of climate scenarios used in the financial sector are limited: often based on unrealistic assumptions and failing to provide a holistic view of the impacts of climate change. Investors need better tools with which to assess real-world risks and opportunities in the short and long term. The sheer depth of the shifts needed to create a just and sustainable world opens up new possibilities, innovations and unexpected solutions – and therefore, many plausible futures. 

New perspectives, newcomers and fresh connections were all welcomed additions to this year’s International Sustainability Transitions conference.