A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

Complete success on climate right now looks like things getting worse, more slowly than they otherwise would have.

Oh, well, this is going to make kids sick. Beth Sawin, PhD in Biology from MIT, author of multi solving creating system change in a fractured world, founder and director of the multi solving Institute, and she created the Climate Interactive. What’s

the crisis that’s keeping you awake at night? But also, is there a way to address or ameliorate a crisis that someone else is also staying awake at night about?

You’re listening to A Climate Change this is Matt Mattern, your host, I’ve got a great guest on the program, Dr Beth Sawin. Beth has got an incredible background, PhD from MIT in biology. She’s written a book, author of multi solving, creating system change in a fractured world. She’s also the founder and director of the multi solving Institute, and she created the Climate Interactive so welcome to the program.

Beth, yeah, thank you so much for having me. So I always like to start off with, what kind of is your backstory as to how you ended up in the climate movement, what drew you or in this world environmental space?

Yeah, I had a couple definite right angle turns in my journey. So I started out as a scientist, a biologist. I studied neuro genetics at MIT, and I actually loved that research. But about three quarters of the way through, I remember this moment. I was sitting in the dark where I did most of my research with a microscope in the cold, it was like a constant temperature, maybe like 40 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

And I started to think about how few people actually knew this very kind of, like minute area of a minute area that I was studying, and at the same time, in my free time, I was volunteering for groups focused on nuclear disarmament and global environmental issues, and started to feel like I had it backwards, like I was volunteering on the thing that called to me and that I thought the world needed me to step up on. I had no sense of how to make that switch.

I thought, you know, I was being trained basically to be an academic, a professor run a research lab. But it was a really fortuitous thing that a professor I had known in my undergraduate, Donella Meadows, was starting a research institute focused on these global environmental issues. And she some of your listeners may know her work. She was one of the authors of the 1972 study the Club of Rome report on the limits to growth. So her fields were systems thinking and global environmental policy.

And long story short, she was looking for for young people to staff this new institute she started in the late 90s, and invited me as part of that team, which was a total change of focus. An interesting sidelight of that is, you know, I was studying genetics, and she needed a computer modeler to build models of complex systems. And it’s like, ah, you know, you realize I haven’t been trained in this. And she’s like, Oh, it’s okay. I taught myself at the kitchen table. Like, no problem. You’ll be able to do that.

It turns out it was a problem. She was brilliant, like, she could teach herself at the kitchen table. I had to take some classes and work really hard, but I did eventually get there. So that was a right angle into complex systems and environmental policy. And from there, I’m sure we can talk about some other twists and turns from climate policy to multi solving, but maybe I’ll, I’ll leave it for there, there for now.

Okay, well, that is a fascinating turn of events. And you know, kudos to you for being flexible enough and conscious enough to say, hey, this isn’t really what I want to be doing, and I’m willing to shift into something that’s unknown, and I don’t know where it’s going to lead, but this is where my heart is telling me I should be spending my effort.

So I think that’s a great message to anybody out there. I was going to say to say to young people, but I think it applies to really anybody at any stage that we can pivot and try something new, something that calls to us. So why don’t we shift to your book, multi solving, creating system change in a fractured world.

What led to your writing that maybe first to say what multi solving is, since not everyone’s familiar with the word, but everyone is probably familiar with the idea, which is just that in life, at all scales, in our own lives, but in businesses and policy, we can find these actions where one action can address multiple needs at the same time. So. That’s multi solving. It can be like greening a city. That is going to help with really climate effects, like the increasing number of high heat days.

It’s going to help absorb storm water so there’s less risk of flooding. It’s going to make the air cleaner, and it also provides beauty. And actually, lots of studies now show green space improves people’s mental health if they live around it. So one action, greening a city spirals out into all these different benefits or needs met. So that’s multi solving. Writing a book about it. One reason was kind of like I just said that most of us know the concept, but maybe don’t have a word for it.

I feel like one thing my colleagues and I can do with our research and our findings is kind of a hold up a mirror to what we call a hidden movement. People are doing this all around the world more and more and more creatively, finding these actions that meet multiple needs, but they might feel kind of like they figured it out on their own, and that it’s kind of not necessarily like a field you could get into or a body of practice or a set of skills. So one goal of the book was to help people kind of realize there was sort of a home for them in this field of multi solving.

So I know I’ve read about things kind of are similar to this, or in Paris, they have made the city more walkable and have taken cars off the streets, and it seems as though pollution is lifting when they do satellite images of Paris before and after and and That’s pretty remarkable. What’s happening there. Maybe you can talk about that and other cities that have done that, and what are the measurable effects, kind of for climate change, and how that is making an impact.

Yeah, yeah. Cities are definitely one of the maybe, would say, hotbeds of multi solving. I think it’s a scale where people can see how all the pieces fit together, maybe a little bit more closer to the ground, in a way. So transportation is one place like you just mentioned. So if cities can be designed so that people can move more easily, say, by bike or by foot.

Then there’s, of course, reducing emissions from the transportation sector, but there’s also enormous health impacts from that. As people have safe ways to get more physical activity, there’s a decrease in chronic disease, and so less stress on health systems and less expense in that way, then there’s economic ripples from things like that. So other studies show that if people move through a city at the pace of walking or biking, they’re more likely to visit local shops, you know, for a coffee or to to purchase something.

So there’s an economic advantage of moving at that more human scale, so you have climate protection, health and economic vitality kind of tied into one package. Green Space is another example. Energy efficiency is full of multi solving in the sense that if you can reduce the amount of energy a building uses, of course, that saves greenhouse gas emissions.

It tends to save money for the people who are living in that housing. Other studies show ways in which it improves people’s health by living in housing that is more comfortable, say, warmer in the winter, another whole set of benefits for health. So there’s, there really are these opportunities, and the cities that are moving forward are the ones that figure out how to build the partnerships between these different sectors. So the the health actors and the job actors and the climate advocates can find ways to accomplish things together.

So in terms of scaling this. How do you see this working? And what are your thoughts as to how to make this more of a global movement, where, where people are are implementing these strategies effectively?

Yeah, that has been a question that has interested my colleagues and me and some of our funders. Early on, we had a funder that was interested in these intersections of climate change and health, and they asked us to do a global scan of where we could see examples of projects that advanced climate and health. At the same time, we found them all over the place, and what the funder was thinking we would do is come back and tell them, like, how to replicate these projects in more places?

And that’s what we set out to do. And then about halfway through, we realized that wasn’t quite the right question, and that’s because each project was so specific for its local circumstances, the exact needs it was meeting the history. History of a place, its geography, its culture, that you couldn’t really take, you know, the plans for a project in South Africa and bring them to Kansas and replicate it at the same time, because we were looking across all this diversity, there was this sense of that’s true, they’re very specific, but there’s also something in common, and we started to call what was in common, what we were seeing, the multi solving way.

And so it’s less about the specific projects and more about an approach. Part of it is a real prioritization of building trusting relationships across these different divisions like climate and health or city and state people were spending time building those connections in order to do these projects, whether it was urban agriculture or energy efficiency, it kind of didn’t matter for what we were seeing as the multi solving way it was.

It was common across them all. So now, when people ask us if we want to see more multi solving, what should we do? That’s one thing we emphasize, is focus on building relationships across sectors. We also kind of hand in hand with that is really paying attention to fairness, justice and equity. And the one reason for that is you can’t really sustain relationships across different borders, if the relationships between people aren’t healthy, fair and just so so many of our societies have legacies of different types of oppression to really capture the full potential of multi solving people need to grapple with that very often.

So relationships, equity, solidarity is another thing we talk about, which is the idea that if you’re bundling these different needs together, you really have to come to a place where you care about those other needs as much as the one that brought you to the table. One way I sometimes explain this to people is if there’s an alliance of the children’s asthma coalition and a climate organization, you want to see the climate advocates like showing up for the asthma events and worrying about the children with asthma as much as they’re worrying about the 100 Year climate future and vice versa.

It’s it’s like both issues end up mattering to both people, and we contrast that to the sort of passing political alliances that you sometimes see, like, I’ll vote for that if you’ll vote for this, but we’ll then kind of never be there for each other again. Long term multi solving is a little different sense of connection than that. Well,

I’ve talked to some people recently on the show, and one of them, we were talking about the connection between climate and health and and that, I think that that would be very persuasive to most people. When they focus on, oh, well, this is going to make kids sick.

That is very persuasive to most people, whereas, okay, it’s may cause sea level rise in some period of time in the future, maybe is a little bit too academic and too too far off in the future for somebody to engage with, not everybody, but some people are just going to be like, well, that’s that isn’t a problem I need to solve today. And so they don’t listen. So what has your experience been in kind of the linkage of climate and health and how that can be a powerful connection and a tool to communicate?

Yeah, for sure, I think you’re naming something really important. We talk about how multi solving can unify timescales. So if you take a certain action, like, let’s say you close down a coal fired power plant near a city that’s going to have some pretty rapid and local effects on local air quality, and it’s going to have, as you’re saying, some multi decade effects, a small contribution to global climate change, so longer term and more Global, to build the political momentum to take that action, there’s a better chance if you can bring those timescales together, and the people who advocate for those timescales together so often, what it takes is understanding how the pieces do fit together.

And another element, when you start to think about the terms of Office of Political leaders is often those short term effects are going to be soon enough that you can talk about them in the next campaign right like there are this many jobs or the air quality improved this much in climate change. The sad truth is that complete success on climate right now looks like things getting worse, more slowly than they otherwise would have, which is a pretty hard campaign promise, right?

Like, yeah, it’s worse, but it would have been even worse if we hadn’t done whatever it is that we’re doing. So multi solving, it’s not a trick, right? It’s just widening the boundaries of how you communicate and helping people see connections between issues. Use so that you can bring the short term and the local into the same conversation as the long term and the global.

What are the successes that you are seeing and the challenges of having this adopted on a wider basis and being effective, say, in solving national problems here in the US as well as international problems, or is this really something that is local, local and isn’t meant to be kind of used on a national or international basis?

Yeah, one approach that we’ve taken to learn more about multi solving is to look for the bright spots where it’s been successful. And what we see is that pretty much everywhere we’ve looked, both geographically but also at different scales, we find examples of successful multi solving. The thing is, they tend to be the exception, not the rule. So in the sense that anything that exists is possible. It already seems clear to us that multi solving is possible from local to global and all over the world.

And often those stories, those bright spots, are what help people start to understand the potential. And an interesting thing for these times when there is such a sense of of crisis. You know, we’re talking here in the United States. Other parts of the world have other reasons for a sense of crisis. A lot of the multi solving examples we find did emerge as a response to a crisis. So maybe, sure, I’ll share a few examples of those. One that we studied happened in Japan after the Fukushima disaster. If you remember, after that disaster, across the nation, they they turned off really quickly the nuclear power stations.

And so that created an energy crisis. It took a while to stabilize from that and so in a big search for energy efficiency, companies across Japan started a project they called Green curtains, which were vegetative curtains that would grow up the south sun facing sides of factories. So they provided shade, which reduced the energy needs for cooling. But they planted species that also produced food that ended up being funneled into company cafeterias, or in some cases, employees could take them home for their own families. So you have a response to energy crisis. Of course, saving energy also tends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And then you have this sort of angle of of healthy food thrown in on top of it. So so there’s a crisis that led to solutions that address not only that precipitating crisis, but other important needs of the society. At the same time, another one that is one of my favorites came in New Zealand. It was in response to the 2008 financial crisis, and one effect in New Zealand was the construction trades had a slowdown. And so there was an initiative from the energy efficiency ministry to get construction trades back to work by weatherizing people’s homes. So they did that, and it was successful in that a whole bunch of homes were upgraded.

It did provide jobs in the construction sector. It saved money for people living on fixed incomes. And then a bunch of researchers looked at the people living in those homes, and they found out that also they were having fewer hospitalizations and reduced medication expenses by virtue of living in healthier homes. And in fact, in the next round of that project, public health actors became partners in what had at first just been a construction building kind of sector effort, and it got to the point where doctors could refer patients for these home energy upgrades. So in that case, financial crisis, climate and health solution kind of boiled into it.

So I encourage people, you know, as we’re all, I think, looking for how to be of use in the different crises that face our communities, to think just like one or two levels bigger, not only what’s the crisis that’s keeping you awake at night, but also is there a way to address that, that would solve a crisis or ameliorate a crisis that someone else is also staying awake at night about, and that gives you a sense of of a potential partner who you may need to go out and find, but that’s the kind of way to think your way, way to try to think your way into multi solving that’s fascinating and essentially like looking for the crisis and seeing, hey, here’s an opportunity.

Certainly, the current administration in Washington has created enough crisis that that there are loads of opportunities. 90s. One that I was thinking about was Phoenix. And over the last few years, the many, many days, over 100 degrees in temperature, do you see that city kind of adapting to that crisis and kind of planting the vegetation that would help create shade and slow down the the heat islands that are developing there.

Yeah, I don’t, I don’t have any like direct partners in Phoenix, so it’s hard to speak about on the ground experience there, but I would say across the country, there has been growing momentum for things like that, for increasing the Urban Canopy. And I always think it’s important to to this may be obvious to your listeners, but it’s important to say it whenever we get the chance, that all of these solutions have their limits and that they they really are not going to keep us safe against unrestrained climate change.

So you know, like, there have been places near where I live, in Vermont that have gotten a year’s worth of rain in a day, and you can do all the wetland restoration you want to do to try to soak up that rain, but there are limits to these solutions. So it’s really from our point of view, it’s essential that we do all of these things to adapt, and it’s kind of a no brainer, because so many of them have other benefits, like we’ve been talking about, and we really need to get our economies off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

And I know your your show is about that, so I’m not saying anything you don’t know, but just to, just to remind us all of the limits of some of these solutions too.

Well, I appreciate you saying the the fact that there are limits to your approach, you know, and then also that we do need to get off of fossil fuels. What are your thoughts on, on how we can best accomplish that? Of getting our economy off of fossil fuels, is that something that is more systemic, that we need to have governmental input at a national level, or is individual effort going to be sufficient?

Yeah. Well, first, I would say that getting off of fossil fuels is, in and of itself, a multi solving solution. And you don’t have to take it from me. The World Health Organization periodically puts out a report about this, and each time they do, the conclusion has pretty much been the same, which is the costs of meeting climate targets like the Paris Climate Accord goals, the costs of the energy transition to do that the World Health Organization says are more than balanced by the health system savings alone.

Then that’s because so many diseases that take such a toll are made worse by air pollution, and a lot of air pollution comes from burning fossil fuels, so diseases like respiratory illnesses, but also cardiovascular disease, premature birth, dementia, more and more people, researchers are finding the air pollution exacerbation of all of that. So one, I think untapped opportunity to make faster progress on climate is to tackle it as a full society with the health benefits in the same equation as the energy system transition costs, your question about like whether this can be done by individuals, or does it require the highest levels of government?

I tend to think of it as both. You know, my field of complex systems tends to really lead you away from either or answers, and you see how movement in one direction enables more movement in another direction. So an example of that if, if citizens start to invest in rooftop solar, well, that increases the orders that has more manufacturing happening. There’s the learning curves that happen in any industry. When you do something more, you get better and faster at it. The cost falls. That enables more people.

It opens up opportunities for people, maybe who couldn’t have afforded it before. So there you have individuals and companies in a reinforcing feedback loop that that, you know, drives the curves that we see for wind and solar of falling costs and more and more installations and governments with their ability to, for instance, enact policy that charges more of The costs, more of the harms of fossil fuels, could add into that same equation and make those reinforcing feedbacks spin even faster.

And then, of course, it’s not only one level of government. A lot of what people are trying to figure out right now in the United States is with the federal government making such a dramatic turn from. As being, you know, a force for change with the inflation Reduction Act to withdrawing so much of that support, what can cities and states and individuals and businesses do on their own? And of course, it’s quite a lot, and it’s also not the same.

Like there is a gap, and I think it’s irresponsible if you know, people want to cheer, cheer each other up and say, No matter, we can do it all. From what I see, I don’t think that’s accurate either. There’s a lot of space between all is lost and there’s nothing to worry about. And I think for better or worse, we live in that middle ground.

I agree with you that it does require individual and collective and governmental action, and we can do what is within our grasp now and work for a government that is more responsive to these issues. Certainly, one of the things that you said was the WHO report regarding cost savings because of air pollution resulting from fossil fuels, and I don’t think that gets enough airplay, having interviewed people for the last four and a half years, I don’t recall anybody mentioning that study.

And I think that it is vitally important that it gets it gets communicated to the larger population, because that is yet another reason why we should be making these changes to transition away from fossil fuels, because it improves our health. And here are studied ways of why it improves our health in all kinds of ways, just isn’t getting enough attention. I don’t see it if enough in the news. I’m reading lots of articles about the climate, and it’s not that it never gets any attention, but it’s just not enough.

Well, I think there’s two challenges, and you’re naming one of the two. So one is just awareness. And for a while at our Institute, we thought that was a gap we could help fill. So we’re technical people, we can read and digest and translate these studies, and we’ve done some of that, but we started to see awareness might not be the only barrier, and the second barrier is how our societies are structured, to make decisions and to explain this, I often ask people to imagine a nation that is going to make a transition, say in its transportation sector, away from fossil fuels.

So where do the costs of that land? Well, probably the transportation ministry, maybe the energy ministry, like those are going to be costs in their sort of accounts, if they’re successful, who’s going to have a windfall? Well, that’s going to be the health minister, right? Hospitals are going to have fewer people with such severe illness from air pollution, but but very rarely will the health minister be brought into those conversations. Usually, they are working in different buildings.

They certainly are speaking different technical languages, and so part of what multi solving is is to try to widen the pool of decision makers and draw the boundaries for these decisions differently. So the costs and the benefits are in one equation, because for the nation as a whole, what what the World Health Organization is telling us, for the organization as a whole, for the for the nation, in this case, as a whole, this would be a win, right?

But if you’re just, you’re just sitting there looking at your career within the energy or transportation ministry, it looks like all costs on your side, and that’s a source of inertia that we just can’t afford.

So it all boils down to accounting. My brother, who’s a CPA, will be happy to hear this. It’s an accounting problem. So well, Beth, it’s been great having you on the show. I know you’ve got other things to attend to, but really appreciate your spending time with us and sharing really some great concepts and hopefully things that will move the needle for all of us.

You’re the founder and director of the multi solving Institute. I’d love to have you tell people about how they can contribute to you and to the work that you’re doing, as well as go out and get your book multi solving, creating system change in a fractured world.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show. And if this has grabbed people’s interest, our website is easy, multisolving.org and one of the best things you can do is find a few people and read my book together. We’re hearing reports around the world of people having informal book clubs. Reading this book. There’s questions for discussion at the end, and it might provide an avenue to discover some local multi solving wherever you are, and we would love to know about it if you do.

Okay, well, thank you. And yeah, everybody go out and check out the book and bring it to your book clubs, or create a book club even better. So thank you, Beth, and we we look forward to following your work going forward.