The Berlin Manifesto v2.0
By: Norman Matrix
Tags: Ipcc, Paris Agreement, Climate Action, Fridays For Future, Climate Change

Fridays for Future has paved the way for a new realization of the treasures our planet holds dear. It is an achievement that history has yet to rank in it’s monumental scale which Greta Thunberg single-handedly forced into existence. She acknowledged the grave situation our society has reached due to the inability to follow more than 30 years of climate research recommendations. She sat down next to the Swedish parliament with a self-made sign stating the fact that from now on, she would strike school attendance to bring awareness to this situation. She succeeded, getting carried throughout the world to spit her angry message at the world leaders. Grey haired men, wearing expensive designer suits, not knowing what was happening to them as her angry voice obliterated the schemes and excuses that dominated climate policy for decades now.

There is no doubt left among leaders of relevance now that, to put it in Greta Thunberg’s words, the world is on fire indeed. Many books have since been written about her involvement in the climate activism rising like a new star on the northern sky. Books have been written about the scientific status quo. Books have been written about the policy issues involved. It might be safe to say that most words in regards to the crisis of human-created climate change have been spoken or written already.

Why write this white-paper then? As an expert in risk management and digital taxonomy, I am approaching the climate change situation with a different angle. Instead of talking about the problems and hurdles currently creating a hard impasse in the rectification of the climate situation, what is offered here is a solution. The Berlin Manifesto was initiated as part of an performance art project. Art should be not a mirror for society, but a sword that transforms it. These words by Leo Tolsky have inspired me to venture on a wild trip around Europe and the digital realm, gathering impressions from all corners of our society.

The original Berlin Manifesto is documented here on medium.com. This white-paper offers an in-depth review of all back then suggested notions, as well as other related issues as found on the performance art hub website and my experience as ISO quality, risk and security manager. If you follow the authors artistic ramblings throughout the web you might with with reason take his output with the grain of salt assigned to those that are definitely on the crazy side of our large human family.

Throughout the performance art project I have unfortunately fallen deep into the lysergic reality of hallucinogenic enlightenment. I have accidentally set fire to the apartment of my ex partner and me. I have been held captive by police, incarcerated for arson. You name it, I made the mistake. But, given the benefit of doubt, reading this white-paper I hope you will realize that my visions of a better future hold truth in my experience of two decades of transforming organizations and digital systems in a vast variety of sectors. Finally, and this is what made me set out and create an amalgam of scientific, sociological and artistic explosion, I think if Greta Thunberg has proven nothing else it was that you can definitely change the world by being crazy with maybe just a bit of charming smart added on top.

Reading the IPCC report made me realize two central issues creating the policy grid lock we have been observing for years now: the complexity of the issues involved and the lack of clear, modern risk management supervision.

The first issue is simple to understand. In the end, leaders of our international organizations like the United Nations, high profile politicians, and economic decision makers coming from large corporations or think tanks are responsible for managing this crisis. And, while these persons are quite smart on the their own for obvious reasons, their challenging day to day tasks do not allow them to submerge in the climate issue for months throughout. The IPCC report is thousands of pages thick, even the summaries for policy makers span endless pages of numeric reiteration of degrees, emission data, and the likes. It is easy to get lost in between the physical reality of climate change and the political reality of executing necessary change. The climate crisis is, after all, the largest scientific endeavour since the moon landing took place. The output of thousands of the smartest minds on this planet can be cumbersome to consume.

The second issue is more intricate, and to my disappointment not really part of the public discussion around the slow implementation of change of mitigation initiatives. Modern management utilizes agile and cyclic means to ensure that even the most complex projects can be progressed towards their goal within a reasonable time frame. The unicorns forming the basis of Silicon Valley technology impacting society at unprecedented scale have shown how you are able to implement monumental change within years. While individual excellence and centralized control certainly often plays a factor at modern transformative projects, management has for decades now also aligned with modern tools that originate in the assembly construction lines of Japanese automaker Toyota in the 70s.

It was my realization that if the Facebooks and Googles of this world are able to modify our behavior as well as our economics deeply and on global scale within years, there should be no reason why our nations are unable to do the same. Is it not a matter of life and death which compares to a mundane matter of technical comfort and monetary gain? How is it that the biggest issue humankind has ever faced by it’s own creation, the literal box of Pandora, is not handled with the same efficiency and care that benefits the business goals of modern super corporations? My world is different to Greta Thunberg’s reality. I am 40 years old and spent my life in the digital trenches. But where she hit a brick wall of non-realization in the way the politicians ignore the climate crisis, I hit a similar brick wall in the way the politicians failed to execute necessary change.

I have to admit that without Greta bringing this topic to everybody’s attention I might have never stumbled into my passion for saving this planet’s ecology. My life has been filled to the brim with artistic initiative and professional responsibility when I saw this brave girl screaming her truth at the gathered world leaders. But, and I cannot thank her enough for this, the more I started to invest time into the climate crisis situation, the more I hit the same feeling she emanated. How can the world be this wrong? How can she, a mere school pupil, maybe gifted with supreme intellect, but a child at the time nonetheless, see things that everyone else ignores. How can I, a mere technology evangelist and art pupil, maybe gifted with similar psychological oddities as Greta, see things that everyone else ignores.

Using the lens of risk management, I identify five major deficiencies in current climate change policy procedures:

Paris agreement and similar additive policies by bodies like the European Union or China are only loosely targeting emission goals. There is a lack of definite attached mitigation mechanism. Current democratic processes do not consider the flexibility required to implement both milestone and an actionable plan at the same time. As it stands policy equals wishful thinking, and there is yet to be proof of goals actually being delivered on time.

Considering the global nature of carbon emissions, radiative forcing, carbon sink issues like deforestation, or ice shield loss it is without question that only a coordinated planet-wide effort is able to achieve significant chances of rectifying measures being effective. Available democratic means in the different regions, political unions, and nations are non-standardized and subject to local democratic power balances. The complexity and impact of the climate crisis demands transparent, efficient, and standardized management strategies in place.

Public discussion and policy activities focus on the reduction of carbon emissions via immediate measures. In traditional management we currently only consider the project phase. Recent and mid-term historic experience shows that the operational phase of the implemented means holds both potential and risk currently not or only unsatisfactorily managed. New technology is regularly bolstered by economic subsidy, only to dwindle as the money disappears or other inconveniences arise. There is a need for contingency on all implementation paths, as well as continued lifetime reporting.

Currently there is no democratic umbrella process in place that is able to cover all stakeholders. The ultimate impact of risks attached to climate change demands guarantees and enforceable strategy. Only the United Nations, NATO, and WTO currently hold a position feasible for policing climate change action. As such, it is vital that this position is formalized and empowered to a point where deviation from climate goals becomes the non-preferable solution. The fight against the climate crisis is only as strong as the weakest (significantly scaled) stakeholder, since any country is able to negatively impact most important climate change variables planet wide.

Currently available means which effectively reduce carbon emissions are still in large parts economic trade offs. While the balance is shifting towards clean, renewable energy and similar technology, it is without doubt an economic challenge to implement significant emission reduction goals. The global economic imbalance needs to be considered for climate equity. Also, climate change risks are asymmetrically distributed over the globe, with many risks hitting economically underprivileged regions harder.

The climate situation is a ripe for more liquid democratic processes since the necessary counter measures are difficult to implement and often overlap with policy making. The current six year IPCC cycle is a prime example for the deficiencies attached to slow and cumbersome political reality. Technology moves faster than politics right now, and it is a catastrophe that the best available means are often not deployed for mere delay of decision making.

An essential lateral interest in climate policy arises from sun-setting of legacy technologies. Currently there is no interest in a global common sense where this activity takes place. Local politics lean in favor of climate killers for political opportunity, or in favor of cleaner technology only to stop action at borders of legislature. The climate crisis knows no borders and geographic segmentation, as it is mostly global phenomena resulting in the projected risk factors.

For the sake of discussion I name the proposed mechanisms Eco-socialism 2.0. This is not a definition rooted in the existing Eco-socialist conventions, or an argument against globalization or Neo-liberalism. To the contrary, I propose more global thinking in attacking the crisis, even if some means might imply a more local look at available resources.

Eco-socialism 2.0 is the natural term for the construct of this white-paper because in the spirit of fair distribution of economic resources an effective battle against the climate crisis demands a fair distribution of the load attached to reducing the carbon emissions to net-zero or even negative targets within a reasonable time frame.

My endeavour into the mad decent of art intervention is not part of this white-paper. You will certainly find more on that in the future in other channels. Since my rehabilitation I have though set course to provide my experience and knowledge in a fashion less destructive for society. What follows is my first try to make amends. I would like to wrap this introduction up with an apology to those that paid dear price for my unrestrained passion raised in my hell trip: my ex partner R., our landlord, my friends, family, and the countless others I have without restraint hurt in the name of truth and greater good. Art should be a sword, this one I agree on with Leo, but you should not hit the innocent with it.

Five years of Paris

It is a common misconception which is only slowly disappearing that the climate crisis is an issue only manifest in the far future. Facts are getting stronger by the day that global warming drivers do already raise severe issues today. Around the globe the impact can be felt in extreme weather situations and catastrophes increasing in frequency. It is vital for the case of fighting the climate crisis that the correlation between such incidents and climate change becomes understood better and part of public awareness.

The disconnect between carbon emissions and climate impacts, which can be thought of in the scale of decades, creates a difficult landscape for policy baseline. Hard emission cuts cost money, cut into labor and workforce topics, and can impact the everyday convenience for citizens. There is an obvious need for strong argument in favor of climate change mitigation measures. The impact of global warming today is exactly that, a good case for investing into the future of our planet.

The first victims of global warming do live in the global south. Equity will be a topic later on in this white-paper, but looking at the pacific island nations right away highlights the severity of global warming today for many humans inhabiting sea level habitat fully exposed to oceanic changes. IPCC report estimates are uncertain about the effective sea level rise to be expected for the different pathways, but numbers in between 1.3 m and 2.4 m by 2100 should easily highlight the massive issue on the horizon for island nations. Their countries could simply disappear from the maps of the earth.

Current sea level rise numbers are though only around 4 mm per year, so this effect is not felt much today. The island nations do see though a high increase in number of cyclone events. Cyclones are huge rotating air masses that exert low air pressure in their center, thus creating high waves and resulting in severe flooding next to heavy thunderstorms. Similar events are felt as hurricanes in the Atlantic region with increasing frequency.

The effects of cyclones to the small Pacific island nations are catastrophic. These countries are put at extreme risk by such events due to their remoteness. Foreign help is likely days away for many of these nations. Due to slow economic development many such nations also suffer from low infrastructure and building quality, with sanitation, fresh water, electricity, and other basic needs for living being underdeveloped and directly impacted by cyclone events. Children of such nations are kept busy throughout the year heaving mud out of their flooded homes instead of attending school or enjoying a risk free childhood.

Wildfires are seeing more awareness in western media due to the immediate vicinity to highly populated areas. Wildfires pose an extreme risk to inhabitants of affected dry vegetation areas, with devastating destruction resulting from fires spreading at high speed according to topology and weather situation. 2020 has been an unfortunate record year for California, where Wildfires have burnt more than 2 million acres of land, which encompasses more than 4% of the total area of the country. Climate change has been attributed to increase in frequency of wildfire, increase in area burnt, as well as the extension of the wildfire season into previously colder months.

Huge power outages affecting hundreds of thousands of people are caused by such events. It is only thanks to the highly equipped emergency rescue operations of countries like California that people are able to escape or being rescued. Wildfires are phenomena also seen in less developed regions of the globe, with severe risks to human life incurred due to infrastructure not up to par to handle these often extreme fire blazes.

India as another example is also already seeing heavy effects from global warming in ever increasing water shortages. In 2018 there already have been 600 million citizens seeing acute water shortages. The decrease of snow cover during the winter season effects the water supply throughout the year. Fresh water is distributed over thousands of miles. Rain fall capture can only offset the change in spring water supply where effective technology is available. At the same time the Monsoon increases in intensity, so drought periods are alternated by heavy flooding. Catastrophic effects are observed both in residential and agricultural habitat.

Even western nations not commonly associated with heavy weather effects are already feeling global warming. Germany has seen the worst drought period in over 250 years in 2020. The summer heat is exceeding 30 degrees Celsius over extended periods of time, which has previously been unknown in the cool Gulf stream influenced climate region. Rivers run dry under such conditions, as well as trees dying, thinning out the essential forest biospheres. Both ecological effects and economic effects are devastating. Inland shipping is blocked by lowering river levels, and crops are failing due to lack of irrigation water. The country is not equipped yet to move the large quantities of missing water supply over the large distances from Alpine mountain regions into the northern low lands.

Heat waves are particularly intense in the global south. Africa, for example, is warming faster than the world average. Worsening the situation response for the African population is the lack of proper reporting in the often low developed countries. Mean average temperatures of above 29 degrees Celsius are considered life threatening, numbers previously only recorded for small Sahara desert parts. Lack of data and response plans is already putting peoples lives at risk.

Scientists are also predicting that global warming might increase the severity of snow blizzards in the winter. The Alpine region has seen up to 2 m of snow in valley areas in 2020, with precipitation exceeding previous record years. Even if not all events can be directly linked to climate change effects, the increase of frequency and severity of weather extremes and catastrophes is without doubt already showing us the direction our climate is heading to.

To find the popularity vote required for stringent climate change policy, it is essential that news and education is adapted to highlight the effects of global warming as it is felt now already. It is much too convenient to view the crisis as some remote or distant future thing that might as well not exist or never affect some area of population. Fact is, all IPCC pathways show severe global warming effects, and the current carbon emission figures indicate that it will require a massive feat to achieve anything near the Paris agreement goal of “well below 2 degrees Celsius”.

At the 2020 five year anniversaries “Climate Ambition Summit” world leaders like Xi Jinping, the EU commission leader Ursula von der Leyen, and Pope Francis urged swifter action for climate action.

Generally, many countries are apt to promise mid term goals but fail to commit immediate mitigation. In addition, the commitment of the Paris agreement only requires the signatory parties to publish nationally determined contributions (NDC), but fails to enforce the legislature necessary to make these measures binding. The result is that emission levels are still rising at alarming rate, with current emission levels tracking the previously thought to be implausible representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5.

The intermediate IPCC 1.5 degrees Celsius report states around 1 degrees Celsius of existing global warming compared to pre-industrial levels, leaving anything between a few years and at most around 15 years left for the RCP 1.9 goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius. It seems implausible to reach emission zero within the designated time frame, with Paris agreement’s “well below two degrees Celsius” challenging effective carbon emission reduction progress.

The fragility of the Paris agreement has further been highlighted by actions of the likes of Donald Trump, who opted to withdraw the United States from the commitment altogether. Luckily the democrats won the 2020 election, and Joe Biden promises to reestablish the countries’ Paris agreement signatory with increased focus on global warming in policy making.

Notable positive commitments have been provided in 2020. The European Union has increased it’s aspirations with a 55% reduction from pre-industrial levels at 2030. China designated 2030 for “at least” 65% carbon emission reduction compared to 2005. Unfortunately there is neither a standard of climate target designations nor do all countries or unions agree on a scientific baseline. Beyond the voluntary nature of legislative pressure, this results in skewed interpretations that has been called out as cheating previous goals by critical climate activism groups.

As a side-note the Corona pandemic and resulting emission reductions cause by economic lock down mechanisms have been shown to have little effect on the overall global warming situation. To make things worse, net zero goals generally include vast quantities of carbon emissions getting reduced by as of now non-existent carbon sink technology or reforestation initiatives of unprecedented scale. The current situation can be summed up as dire, or to put it in the brutally honest words of Greta Thunberg “as #ParisAgreement turns five, our leaders present their ‘hopeful’ distant hypothetical targets, ‘net zero’ loopholes and empty promises”.

Overall, the IPCC and United Nations endeavors are showing to fail to deliver necessary guidance and policy pressure to combat the real-world political conflicting goals between climate mitigation measures and ongoing economic challenges. Current technology still lacks the means for easy migration from fossil fuel technology into fully green variants at cost parity.

Energy production, which accounts for around three quarters of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is sitting at 14% carbon free technology. This includes renewable energy like solar and wind power as well as traditional nuclear energy. Electric mobility stands around 3% of new car sales, with high prices and low range not being able to see enough offset by subsidy. Industrial carbon reduction technology like hydrogen powered furnaces are still in their infancy.

It should be obvious that Greta’s harsh words are only calling out the truth that most deny to see yet: without policy pressure mounting to much higher levels climate targets are doomed to fail and result in catastrophic global warming levels of 3 degrees Celsius, or even worse. This puts IPCC RCP scenarios like Greenland icecap or permafrost melting into the domain of plausibility, with catastrophic effects on sea level rise or extreme heat and drought rendering large areas of our planet’s surface unlivable in the long term future. The general biosphere consequences of global warming reaching such levels are not well understood, but expected to result in large-scale species extinction.

Risks involved in the worst global warming outcomes include high political instability, human mass migratory scenarios, devastating hunger and poverty rise and other lateral effects in a form unseen since the modern age. The climate crisis might as well be called the end of earth and society as we know it. The goal of this white-paper is not to recap the climate crisis, as it has — thanks to Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Future initiative building awareness — been done countless times in recent years. I aim to provide an out-of-the-box, fresh view on the project, risk and operations management perspective of IPCC’s and United Nation’s well-intended but ultimately doomed intent of mitigation.

Throughout all the negative pictures outlined above I stand with the optimism shared by the young climate activists that necessary change is possible. In the following chapter this white-paper will highlight the shortcomings of management topologies provided by IPCC, and how modern management thinking and existing tooling can help tackle these extremely difficult issues. This thinking does not arise out of my personal good spirit or some supernatural belief system, but the fact that in the digital domain where I come from cataclysmic global-scale transformations have been achieved in recent decades with similar management strategies.

Management strategies

The IPCC working group III has provided valuable meta research on the status of risk management strategies at the time of writing of the 2015 report. It highlights the global warming crisis as a so called risk-risk problem, with both climate change and mitigation cost involving risk for all involved parties (the countries of our planet). Additionally, the management problem is burdened by the complexities involved in the large number of stakeholders (all countries of our planet), and the asymmetric nature of the stakeholders (developed vs. developing countries).

The report encourages international collective action in a very short outline, but fails to explain how this might be achieved without proper means being available beyond the United Nations loose international policy force. From a positive angle, the focus on the definition and quantification of uncertainty which stood sound in 2015 can be realigned today. Many previously unknown links between weather extremes or catastrophes and climate change have since been identified, and carbon emission pathways have worsened up to a point where policy make should more easily lean on the climate risk side of the situation.

Risk perception and awareness, which holds a complete treatise in the report, is, as previously highlighted, also no longer as important as before. On the other hand, the references to intuitive decision making and consequential problems in risk mitigation read kind of prophetic today. Many of the policy initiatives summed up above provide the feeling that they might be a compromise between the reality of majority vote and the deficiencies of intuitive political engagement.

The IPCC working group has highlighted the issue of short-term thinking and present bias, but seemingly not with enough emphasis. The five year Paris agreement United Nations meeting has shown that countries are starting to realize the necessity of harder mid- and long-term commitments, but the status quo shown previously highlights that this still fails to result in effective means being deployed with sufficient reliability.

Ambiguity, which is only given a very short outline, is one of the main deficiencies of the original IPCC reporting form. In demand of scientific soundness and completeness, the large authorship group seems to result in an extremely taxing form of literature. The public discussion around the climate crisis still, after years of ongoing and informed debate, reflects in high ambivalence between the extreme positions of climate activism and global warming negation. This should highlight that from a management perspective there looks to be a lack of middle ground translating between expert comment and decision maker. The recent 1.5 degrees Celsius report summary for policy makers shows increased legibility, but the vast amount of scientific detail and figures still leaves strong doubt if the message is transported in proper fashion for decision makers.

The obvious oversight of IPCC working group III is the omission of project and operations management from the guidance. Beyond the explanation of risk management approaches the IPCC expects with well intended reasoning that the countries and international organizations like the United Nations will be able to deliver the processes required to execute all available means. If the recent years have shown one thing it is that this is not the case.

Anyone accustomed to large scale project and operations management will immediately realize that it is the project structure of the climate crisis that is doomed to fail. Large numbers of stakeholders together with conflicting interests, highly asymmetrical means of delivery, and a total lack of high level governance with executive means would imply failure for most if not all projects on much lesser scale in commercial context.

From an historical point of view the working group also seems to neglect the ultimate consequences of failure in what they call the tail risks of extreme climate change events like high sea level rise destroying a large area of densely inhabited areas. Considering the ultimate consequences of such events, even the off chance of non-conforming partners putting the mitigation strategies at risk demand a much more aggressive stance at risk management.

The climate crisis should therefor be considered more akin to global conflict situations like nuclear proliferation, where game theoretic approaches have found decades of experience in handling such scenarios. This only finds minute mention in the IPCC report. In the sake of sustainable international security it should definitely find proper attention in the future.

Now, considering the climate crisis mitigation as failed project, modern management theory suggests the following failure recovery mechanisms:

There is a clear need for IPCC and/or the United Nations to recruit the necessary technical and/or non-technical resources that seem to be currently lacking. To put things simply, the IPCC consists of thousands of scientists, but the whole issue lacks project management and oversight with executive power. Any company facing a similar issue would hopefully find and appoint the best experienced project manager available with experience to execute on the observed and failed scale.

Any risk management problem can also be seen as a resource management problem. This is obvious in the global warming crisis, where carbon budgeting is the central issue (with other GHG emissions also playing a role not to ignore). Putting the situation in wider context, the effective deployment of green technology incurs second level resource issues. For example, electric vehicle acceptance is largely linked to available battery technology and pricing, with very specific and in parts scarce resources being attached.

Projects require clear operational metrics. The IPCC has delivered on that front by defining variables like carbon budget and radiative forcing. Unfortunately, there is both a lack of enforcement on the metric reporting of the stakeholders as well as a frequency of reporting that leaves much to be desired. The IPCC reporting interval is six year, and only in 2020, marking the fifth year of the Paris agreement, first hard numbers of global (lack of) progress are appearing in intermediate reports.

Even projects with a much lower number of stakeholders require highly efficient means of communications and knowledge management in a commercial context. The cumbersome political reality of the United Nations and IPCC do not show the necessary tooling. Yearly conferences and journal or press release publications are vastly deficient for the delivery of complex project goals with ongoing unexpected hurdles.

This white-paper is written to apply such recovery means to a hypothetical climate crisis response scenario. It is important to consider that currently there is no framework within to execute the proposed mechanisms. As explained the IPCC has good reason to leave such measures open, since there is lack of precedence for global cooperation on such a scale. Unfortunately, and I do not stand alone in this critical mindset, without fundamental empowerment of United Nations, IPCC or some yet to be established global cooperation it is unlikely that anything close to the Paris agreement goals is attainable at all.

The second central aspect of the project recovery this white-paper proposes is that our world is largely dominated by Neo-liberal hyper-capitalistic forces. While we do see a variety of political landscapes ranging from communist or social democratic governance over to fully liberalized markets, it is my firm belief that in the end money dictates the direction the ship is heading. Therefor it is paramount to start to view the climate crisis as an economic crisis. Attaching monetary price to climate variables might be challenging from a scientific point of view, since it introduces yet another step of uncertainty, but I am convinced that the value of this mindset change is worth any effort attached.

The third and last overall recommendation this white-paper follows is that good management for a large group of peers requires some kind of standardized processes. While the IPCC has, as established, delivered benchmark variables, these are not applied in the same fashion. Countries use different baselines for carbon budgeting, and considering the operational management of mitigation approaches there is no standard or central means of tracking at all. Fortunately the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) already covers many of the required management controls.

What follows are a number of management issues that in my view need to be tackled in a concerted fashion for the climate crisis to become a manageable topic. Outside of the scope of this white-paper we are working on the delivery front of required tooling in a project called FRIDAY4FUTURE.NET. The goal of this project is the implementation of a crowd sourced reporting platform that might serve as a reference implementation for future designated information management initiatives by United Nations and IPCC. Only transparent open data reported in regular fashion will provide the necessary agility to continuously adapt policy to economic, industrial and climate reality. More detail on this will follow at the end of the white-paper.

Climate assets

On a most basic level, as explained the climate crisis is an asset management issue. Carbon dioxide and other GHGs are assets that require limitation to curb global warming. Fast scaling of new green technology is also limited by specific resources that simply define assets to become managed. It should not be the limited factor for electric vehicle acceptance if a country has access to the necessary natural resources to produce batteries.

Free markets and attached issues like monopolies or artificial resource scarcity do not provide the required leverage for really fast scaling of all available means. Similar issues arise from knowledge as an asset. Intellectual property protection is a necessary evil of technological innovation to protect research and development investment. On the other hand, it should not be the case that tools available to capture carbon emissions or avoid them altogether are not utilized because the necessary technology is sitting with a company that simply does not do business in some region of the world.

As such I identify five levels of assets in regards to the climate crisis response:

First level assets are variables directly impacting global warming. This includes emissions of carbon dioxide and the other GHGs, as well as sinks like plants, oceans and other soil. One affect global warming directly in a negative fashion, resulting in global warming. The other affect global warming in a positive fashion by offsetting the emitted gases.

Second level assets are physical resources indirectly impacting global warming. This includes all major resources required to build mitigation technology, as well as other major consumables that affect global warming like concrete. The acquisition of these resources needs to be decoupled from free market mechanisms to ensure all countries access in proper quantities. Additionally, resource limitations and proper resource utilization need to be identified and managed in consequence.

Third level assets are immaterial resources that directly incur second level asset cost. This includes energy or fuel consumption. The calculation of these assets needs to be decoupled from the physical resource cost because the root causation enables proper management of the usage. For example, flight miles allow more concrete processing that abstract figures of crude oil extraction.

Fourth level assets are immaterial values indirectly impacting global warming. This includes all intellectual property required to build mitigation technology. This intellectual property needs to be put into the public domain so that innovation can foster without artificial slow down.

The fifth level asset is the cash required to implement mitigation measures. The political reality of equity alone validates to begin with economic management on a global level. Additionally, even developed nations are seeing difficulty in delivering the necessary subsidy to effectively reduce emission levels in the short term future.

Obviously these asset management efforts incur economic effects that also require mitigation. Subsidy of resource of intellectual property holders might be a way to offset costs involved. New means of taxing international trade might be another form. Nuclear resources like Uranium might serve as an example of regulated assets and ways to manage distribution and fair cost sharing. Trade unions like the European Union or the African Union might serve as a priori constructs to implement economic means regionally, with global oversight by the World Trade Organization. This white-paper will not consider the definite means to execute such regulatory intrusions, but expects that without them the climate crisis will not be solved.

The second and third level resources show a large overlap and possibly endless quantity of assets, and should be considered on a case per case basis based on the overall participation on global warming. Major climate crisis drivers like transportation or large industries certainly validate specific consideration, while minor natural resource applications might not show the necessary cost/benefit ratio to do so.

Figure 1: Asset management levels

Above you can see the five levels of managed assets that affect the climate crisis directly or indirectly. Currently the IPCC only recommends the management of the 1st level of the pyramid, as it is implemented by the Paris agreement. Unfortunately, as has been explained before the interactions between the globalized free market, political majority power, and the lower pyramid levels are too intricate to allow for a naturally developing overall solution.

This is the reason why the mindset in this white-paper takes a holistic approach to the management of the climate issue. As will be explained later on, the sensitive topic of climate equity will validate the existence of the 5th level, namely effective cost of mitigation. Only a price tag will allow for the proper distribution of cost between the global north and the global south, where a clear economic slope is reality.

This scheme is accompanied by an additional form of climate asset, namely the human costs incurred by risks considered by the selected RCP. If a realistic current goal would be a three degrees Celsius global warming the respective RCP risks should be selected and cost projected over the course of the century:

First level human climate output is the capability of food production. As physical systems are increasingly disturbed the food production means become challenged. While some regions even see increased means of food production (e.g. increased fish stock in the norther hemisphere) it is again especially the global south that is challenged by drought and other weather phenomena.

Second level human climate output is the overall human health situation. Besides lack of food there is the additional challenge of fresh water supply, the increased risk of heat or cold related health hazards, hurricane or cyclone hazards as well as other weather and catastrophe factors.

Third level human climate output is the livelihood and security for the human population of an area. As the first and second level conditions decrease there will be large areas of our planet that become difficult or impossible to live in, accompanied by physical effects like sea level rise. This will result in human migration of unprecedented scale, with climate refugees incurring both security risk and security cost.

Fourth level human climate output is the economic cost of the aforementioned levels. Each of the climate risks involved incurs a monetary cost value that should be correlated with the mitigation cost of the asset pyramid.

This is subject to limitation due to the uncertainty principles outlined in detail in the working group III report. Nonetheless some cost factor should be defined for the four levels to ensure proper overall economic cost tally.

Figure 2: Human climate output pyramid

Together these two asset types form the overall monetary value or cost of a chosen RCP. Currently the climate response process lacks this kind of transparency. This is the case at the time of IPCC reporting taking place, where the abstract view of the climate situation disconnects completely from economic factors. It is also especially significant though over the course of an IPCC iteration, where the divergence between well-intended but unrealistic national commitments increases attached cost without any means of quantification.

For the sake of completeness I will now highlight the third kind of cost category, namely the biosphere cost. I would like to stress though that in my interpretation of the current pathway situation, purely ecological effects might be a luxury which to protect is no longer feasible. Purely ensuring human survival, economic stability, and security will be challenging enough as it is. The idealistic Paris goals are less than realistic at the moment, and the consequences of that are indeed dire.

Since heavy species extinction is expected in all currently attainable pathways the quantification of biosphere effects should though at least allow for risk response scenarios. For example artificial animal breeding or plant fostering might allow for the protection of some species. This category also incurs potentially severe tail costs due to the intricate link between species in their natural habitats, which are often not well understood and should be closely tracked as species migration and/or extinction increases. The following biosphere climate output variables are identified:

First level biosphere output is the permanent physical system change. This includes sea level rise removing land mass, ice cover disappearing, permafrost thawing, deserts growing and similar effects.

Second level biosphere output is the transient physical system change. Catastrophes like wildfires, hurricanes, cyclones, as well as weather condition changes like heat and drought will change the livelihood of areas for temporary periods throughout the year.

Third level biosphere output is the ecosystem impact. Species will either migrate or go extinct in regions affected by the aforementioned effects.

Identifying the likely scenarios will help proper biological risk response. Unfortunately, as mentioned these effects are often not well understood, so the response actions will require close monitoring of the situation as it increases in severity over the course of the century.

Now that we have identified all assets involved in the climate crisis, traditional asset management suggests to define and manage the processes of acquisition, logistics, maintenance and support, as well as disposal or renewal of assets. This is so called life cycle or operations management, which the following chapter will explain in more detail.

Call for management standards

Currently, the IPCC and in consequence the United Nations only recommend the management of the first asset level, namely the GHG emissions. It expects each nation to properly extract the underlying process structure and implement more granular measures over the different categories explained above. While some countries like the United Kingdom do show in-depth management of many affected variables on their own, the same can not be said for a large part of the stakeholder group. Overall current policy reality creates large carbon budget debt with unclear incidence on how future generations might apply rectification measures.

While knowledge transfer is certainly within the scope of United Nations efforts to coordinate a global climate crisis response, countries like the United Kingdom need to be properly utilized as best practice with clear lessons learned and operations management experience extracted for replication. Ideally this takes the form of a new family of ISO standards specifically designed for governments and large corporations to implement such a best practice on a policy level. Current available ISO standards cover many aspects of environmental management facets, but do not target countries and policy makers per se.

The proposed new standard might provide a governmental umbrella standard covering the following preexisting ISO standards:

ISO 14000 environmental management

ISO 21930 sustainability in building and civil engineering

ISO 50001 energy management

In addition to these specific environment-related standards the following ISO standards already exist to define generic management systems with reliability:

ISO 9000 quality management

ISO 27000 information security

ISO 30401 knowledge management

ISO 31000 risk management

ISO 55000 asset management

Environmental standard coverage is only partial in relation to the afore identified assets. Additionally, the complexity of applying such a large number of standards in an institution, let alone a group of institutions like a government, is extremely taxing on the organizational and process capabilities to deliver. I would therefor recommend the implementation of a new, dedicated family of standards optimized specifically for the use of governments in global warming response.

Having defined a specific governmental climate crisis response standard, policies could be adapted to enforce the implementation of such a standard in addition to the definition of (better comparable) climate goals. This would provide more leverage for United Nations, IPCC, or some other yet to be defined entity with global scope, to apply a higher management cycle frequency. Ideally, as commercial and industrial best practice examples show, some kind of agile process would allow the continuous mode of operations with up-to-date picture of both the climate and the mitigation situation. More on this will follow later on.

The new suggested umbrella standard family would draw from and/or design the following management controls:

GHG budgeting includes the processes and means required to effectively manage GHG emissions and offsetting mechanisms like CO2 certificates (or rather an improved future mechanism).

Natural resource management includes standard asset management mechanisms for all critical natural resources like carbon sink vegetation.

Energy management includes all forms of electricity, heat, cold, or other forms of stored and transported energy.

Logistics and transportation management includes movement of goods and people via land, sea, or air travel.

Building and civil engineering management includes standards for the sustainable construction and operations of buildings and infrastructure.

Industrial management includes standards for the operation and control of industrial complexes.

Intellectual property management includes the storage, distribution and cost sharing of climate crisis mitigation know how.

Agricultural management defines the means to produce crop and life stock, including irrigation methods and water consumption standards.

Fishery management defines the means to produce fish stock.

Healthcare management standardizes the climate crisis response healthcare procedures.

Refugees management standardizes the means of moving large quantities of people during or after natural disaster or negative weather condition change.

Biosphere management includes standards for climate crisis response action in regards to animal or plan migration and/or extinction scenarios.

Budgeting and controlling provides some form of economic book keeping to encompass the total cost of all aforementioned processes.

Asset and information management enables the proper continuous control of all aforementioned assets.

Project and change management enables the implementation of this vast standard family.

Information security management ensures the secure implementation and operation of all aforementioned processes.

As mentioned above there is a large number of existing ISO standards that can provide points of reference in the implementation of these new processes. The wheel does not need to be reinvented here.

The resulting management topology is multi-layered with a clear meta management level at the bottom:

Figure 3: Management topology

Cyclic management

Most forms of modern management philosophies are cyclic in nature. The 2020 Paris anniversary situation highlights the reason for this change in management mode. Projects with long management phases with up-front or top-down waterfall planning are prone to large deviations from their original goals. Considering a six year cycle for IPCC, continuing in the current speed of iteration would imply that in at most three cycles the century course would be laid out without any means left for adaptation.

Cyclic project management acknowledges for the fact that things go wrong, and implements a higher frequency of iteration to give leeway for regular changes in course. Obviously agility as it is displayed in commercial projects is not realistic for IPCC with thousands of scientists, or Paris agreement with close to two hundred nation signatories.

The cyclic nature of climate change mitigation should best consider three different levels with varying frequency:

High level policy cycle where Paris agreement signatories meet and are able to commit effective policy changes

Medium level climate panel cycle where IPCC working groups meet and are able to deliver wrapped up publications

Low level data reporting cycle where all climate relevant data is provided in up-to-date fashion by all stakeholders

Given the utmost importance of the climate crisis finally arriving in the minds of all relevant world leaders a 2 year period for the high level cycle should be realistic to attain. This should be well aligned with national budget phases, which might require adaptation for full efficiency.

The climate scientists should definitely target 1 year or less for future reporting phases. It is to be considered that climate modeling is a highly complex and compute resource intense process, but there is no need for full new simulations coming out every year. The current practice of intermediate reports could be extended though to more thorough yearly reports with an updated calculation of the most important pathways.

Data reporting needs to be at a much higher pace for the management controls to efficiently function. A six week cycle would enable even market driven topics like energy management to react in proper fashion.

Figure 4: Tri-cyclic management phases

Such a tri-cyclic management model would look as follows:

The six week data cycle would take a lot of pressure from the IPCC working groups since many report consumers mainly require updated data sets to work with. A transparent open data platform should provide an ongoing view into all involved climate input and output variables. FRIDAY4FUTURE.NET will be created to establish a reference crowd sourced variant of such a platform.

The goal of this project is to create pressure towards the involved policy makers today to collect data at higher frequency. This should deliver valuable data sets within a short term time frame and prepare governments and academic institutions in a soft manner for the time when an official United Nations governed body like the IPCC starts to operate in a more agile fashion. The following chapter will describe how the reference platform will look like.

Open climate platform

I asked myself the question “How do you create an open climate data platform?” often in recent times. As things stand there is a multitude of different sources around the IPCC, governmental publications, academic research and then there is an obvious huge gap in the available data sets where nothing seems to be handily available. Would it not be nice to have, unrelated to the suggested change of course in this white-paper, a website where you could go to and simply access the latest climate related data?

As it stands even accessing the data beneath the nice charts and visualizations in the IPCC reports is a difficult to neigh impossible feat. If you venture into the heart of the servers storing the climate data for IPCC you will find endless troves of simulation runs and mountains of related data. But simple, easy to implement data sets? You are out of luck on that one.

Now, if you would like to find global carbon emission data on a per country/year level, or even lateral climate data like solar radiance maps, wind maps or other information that influences how climate change mitigation might work out in some region of the world, that leaves you on a hard (and nonetheless exciting) treasure hunt.

How would you collect all that data and make it centrally available? It became clear to me in one of my endless climate research sessions. Wikipedia. Open Street Maps. Crowd sourcing is the magic spell to accumulate data distributed all over the world in hard to access places. We need to activate national citizens that speak the administrative language to contact the governments for carbon budget data. We need to activate IPCC researchers or students in their vicinity to retrieve those hard to find spreadsheets that actually built the charts in the reports. Crowd sourcing allows us to divide and conquer the issue of data acquisition.

The charming thing about such an approach is that we can right away start to build soft pressure towards the entities less willing or capable of producing the data on time, let alone in my desired higher frequency fashion. Regularly asking the government’s environmental department for carbon emission data will trigger more efficient retrieval processes in house. If commercial users get accustomed to semiannual updates from one nation they might just as well start to ask why other nations only provide years old data.

Crowd sourcing is a proven mechanism that has created invaluable data sets in the past. And the high criticality of the climate crisis certainly validates the efforts involved to create a platform efficient, maybe even fun, to do so. This is the mission of FRIDAY4FUTURE.NET, where we set out to do just that. Save the world with data. The platform is currently in bootstrapping phase and will launch in early 2021. Get in touch if you plan to utilize such kind of data, or if you think you might participate in crowd sourcing activities.

Summary and Outlook

This white-paper is written to serve as an out-of-the-box view on climate crisis management. The central premises are:

We do live in a time already affected by global warming

We do have the process and operational tools necessary to manage complex projects

We currently lack the application of such tools to the carbon budgeting measures

I hope that the information contained within this paper finds an interested reader or two, and spawns interest in ISO-grade management controls. There is an obvious challenge in the lack of executive power overseeing the whole climate situation. The United Nations as such are a loosely coupled union, and the lack of consequential decisions around the Paris agreement highlight this unfortunate situation.

Maybe the upcoming IPCC report will further the sharpening of the public perception in regards to climate change projections. The five year Paris anniversary already marked a step in the right direction, with countries strengthening their zero-emission goals. Personally I do keep my fingers crossed, since the future livelihood of us on our planet, as well as our whole biosphere with the wonder that is flora and fauna, does depend on it.