photo (c) John Cairns
Dr Thomas Hale is a Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, where he focuses on how societies can manage global problems effectively and fairly, with a particular emphasis on environmental, economic and health issues.
To mark the 4th anniversary of the Race to Zero, we asked Thomas for his perspective on the Campaign – as a co-lead of its ‘Expert Peer Review Group’ which provides advice to the High-Level Champions on new Partners seeking to join the campaign, develops thought leadership on new-frontiers of net zero and supported the developed of the science-aligned criteria.
We spoke to Thomas regarding the Race to Zero’s role in igniting a ‘whole economy transition. Thomas also shared insights from his latest book, Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time, which articulates the potential to build political will and upgrade our institutions to meet the climate challenge.
How has the Race to Zero evolved?
The Race to Zero has had an extraordinary four years since it launched. In that time, and in large part due to the campaign, the idea of reaching net zero emissions has gone from a scientifically-founded, but abstract global goal – into a concrete target that thousands of entities have set within their operations and value chains. This is a very profound grounding of the global multilateral process into the reality of the lives and day-to-day actions of the engines of our economy.
Multilateral processes often get stuck in gridlock. However, the active role that non-State entities, such as businesses and local governments, are playing in the climate change regime is one of the most exciting innovations in global governance that we’ve seen. The Race to Zero is at the core of that innovation. The achievements of its members and partners has actually led to the fundamental realization that, to achieve our global emissions reduction goals and build resilience, we need ‘all hands on deck.’ Of course, we need national governments to set clear targets and deliver policy – but implementing that requires all parts of society. This now-mainstream idea is a fundamental shift in our political technology that makes us much more effective now than we previously were in tackling the climate crisis.
Of course, it’s not a panacea, this new world of ‘whole economy’ action brings its own challenges. For example, when a city or a company commits to net zero how do governments know they’re really doing it? Equally importantly, especially for countries in the Global South, how do we know that entities have the capacity and resources to actually deliver on their targets? How can we build and strengthen their capacities? These are key questions that we’re now grappling with in this current implementation phase, as opposed to the previous mobilization phase, of the net zero journey. Overall, the Race to Zero campaign has done a huge amount to put us into this exciting new “let’s get it done” landscape.
How important is it for companies to align their climate action efforts, with their public advocacy?
We’ve seen many cases of companies taking impressive voluntary steps towards decarbonisation, but they have not considered how to bring their actions into the mainstream, to ensure that the playing field is levelled for everyone.
Sometimes this results from an internal disconnect between the political affairs and the sustainability department. Sometimes it actually reveals uncertainty about a company’s own commitment to adopt rules to support its decarbonisation, as opposed to the perceived flexibility of a voluntary approach.
I’d say to companies that are wavering on that line – there’s no question that rules are coming. The number of net zero-related regulatory instruments in the G20 countries has grown tenfold since the Paris Agreement was signed. The question is what rules will they be and how quickly will they be put in place?
If you’re a leader on climate change, you will benefit from having better rules sooner, as opposed to operating with weaker rules for longer. The laggards that are intent on slowing the transition benefit most from having weaker rules for longer. The more companies can connect what they’re doing in their own target-setting and implementation, to their broader advocacy and political engagement – the faster they can create the conditions for their strategies to flourish.
A stable trajectory for decarbonisation is in the interests of all businesses, and it’s extremely important for Race to Zero partners to lean into the ‘Fifth P’ – Persuade – through which companies actively support a climate aligned regulatory and policy environment. This is critical to enable all actors to achieve a just net zero transition – helping us to raise up the floor of ambition – as we continue to reach for the stars.
How is the ‘ambition loop’ driving progress on climate?
The logic of the ambition loop is really clear. If you are a city or a region and your national government takes a step forward on climate change, such as by enshrining laws or regulations to help smooth the path to net zero -in turn, it’s far easier to act. But the reverse is also true – if you’re a national government, and your states, cities and businesses take a step in the right direction, that significantly smoothes your path.
Also, on the flip-side, when the ambition loop is turning, the path towards climate action becomes durable and less reversible. For example, as the Net Zero Tracker shows, in 2016, not a single US state had a net-zero target. In 2024, 16 of them do, 12 of which are enshrined in law. At the municipal level, 32 of the US cities with more than 500,000 people have set net-zero targets in either law or policy. And in the private sector, over half of the US companies in the Forbes 2000 list have a net zero target or similar.
In this current ‘super election year’ there’s real concern that climate action will take a hit at the ballot boxes in some countries. However, based on the deepening decentralisation of climate policy in many countries around the world, we can be somewhat reassured that – even though elections go in different ways and leaders rise and fall – the direction of travel towards net zero is clear.
Even if there are bumps along the road, states, cities and companies are better positioned to resist and carry on. This is exactly the benefit of the ambition loop, it creates real resilience to the global net zero journey. It’s just a question of how quickly they get there.
How do you see the climate action landscape developing in coming years?
We’re now in the implementation phase, where countries are establishing rules to propel their key actors to deliver on their targets. There is a huge increase in net zero regulation in areas like climate disclosure and transition planning, but also in lesser-known areas, like procurement rules, and product standards for advertising. The transition is quickly weaving its way into the fabric of the economy, which creates a level playing-field for companies that are trying to do the right thing, by ensuring that everyone plays by the same rules. This also allows key learnings from ambitious voluntary action to be harvested, and brought into the mainstream.
This is an example of what I call a ‘conveyor belt’ model, where voluntary action kickstarts new innovation and approaches which, in turn, proceed into standards – and eventually into regulations, that bring everyone along. If we can supercharge the conveyor belt we can implement climate action far more quickly.
How can societies govern ‘long problems’ such as climate change?
The main message of my new book is that ‘long problems’, such as climate change, which span more than a generation, are hard – but not impossible, to govern. Many countries govern numerous issues today, where there is a significant time-lag between the problem and the solution, such as pensions, infrastructure investments – as well as climate change. There is massive potential to expand and systemise these approaches.
For example, Wales, UK and Finland have set up a Commissioner for Future Generations and a cross-party Committee for the Future, respectively, which are models designed to represent the ‘shadow interests’ of people who are not yet here – but whose lives will be shaped by our actions now.
There is also the ‘trustee’ model, which courts and central banks are increasingly using to preserve the public interest and take far-sighted decisions, well beyond the short-term horizon that politicians are typically focused on. With the support of grassroots activists and community groups, trustees are driving a wave of climate litigation, such as Our Children’s Trust, which represents young peoples’ right to a stable climate, and Switzerland’s ‘Senior Women for Climate Protection’ lawsuit. Climate-related suits have actually doubled from 2015 to 2021, with cases covering corporate greenwash, to the fiduciary duty to consider climate impacts, through to loss and damage.
It’s critical to understand that governing a long problem, like climate change, is not just possible but, in fact, numerous, innovative ‘political technologies’ are evolving in many different pockets of the world to meet the challenge. By better understanding and systemising these methods, we can empower key players, such as cities, states, regions, to reflect the interests of future and current generations in our policies, procedures and institutions.
Some people are waving the white flag at the worsening climate crisis, lamenting a lack of political will – or the inability of our entrenched systems, to drive action. Actually, we need to focus on building that political will and adapting our systems to scale the many solutions at our fingertips.
Can long problems be addressed as well as urgent, short term problems?
This is exactly the delicate balance that policymakers are trying to strike. If you look around the world today, there’s many urgent challenges – from war, to debt and social problems.
These issues keep our focus on the here and now. Of course they matter and demand a response. However, if you scratch the surface of short-term issues, you quickly realize that they are actually deeply and strongly connected to long-term trends and problems. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic was a pervasive short-term, extremely urgent issue. When the virus emerged, countries were unprepared, lacking the systems to deal with it. As a result, the pandemic significantly set back our progress against long term goals, the UN estimates that around four years of progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was lost.
For societies to flourish, it’s not about governing either the short-term or the long term. It’s actually about making long-term plans and investments now to make societies more prepared, and resilient to short-term shocks. It’s a false dichotomy to try to weigh long-term against short term priorities – they’re one and the same problems.
By viewing short and long term in an integrated way, societies can switch from just ‘muddling through’, to a reactive, to taking a proactive stance on complex issues like climate change. As societies, we need to preserve the thought, space and investments for meaningful, deep, long-term decisions, which in turn, makes us more effective at managing short-term challenges and risks.
Are our current institutions prepared to meet the climate crisis?
Typically, institutions have been created to address the early phase of a problem, but then they struggle to usefully tackle the problem as it evolves over time. This is the dilemma of ‘institutional lag.’ It’s clear that we need to make our institutions more long-term oriented, to boost efforts to build better policies around climate change.
For example, Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) were initially established after World War II to rebuild and develop war-torn regions, but they have since evolved to address a much broader spectrum of global challenges, including poverty reduction, sustainable development, and climate change adaptation and mitigation.
When an institution like the World Bank is formed, it’s shaped to be durable over time. An element of inertia is needed for it to be meaningful – without this ‘stickiness’ it would not really be an institution at all. But, as time expands the nature of the problem changes, such as with climate change, and the functions of our entire global financial system must change too.
It’s clear that the World Bank and regional MDBs must offer more concessional finance to unblock the logjam of climate finance to emerging markets and developing economies, which in turn would attract private investment.
If you step back, climate change is going to be a very long-term challenge to deal with. Mitigating climate change, adapting to its impacts and dealing with its damages is going to be a centuries long process. It would be incredible if our political institutions remained completely unchanged in that time. As climate advocates, we need to think creatively about how institutions are going to help us manage long-term challenges – and how we should build their capacity over time. That’s why, in the book, I call for an institutional reform agenda on climate change, as our current decision-making tools are not the best-suited for addressing the problem.
Why do political leaders often struggle with long-term governance?
Our response to long problems is thwarted by the ‘early action paradox’. By definition, we can only address a long problem by acting before its effects are felt. Yet, when the effects of the problem don’t manifest until significantly into the future, early action is slowed down by uncertainty and low salience. Low salience and uncertainty are the kisses of death in politics; they lead to delayed action and allow obstructionist forces to creep in. For example, powerful fossil fuel interests are attempting to block climate action, clinging onto a legacy business model – rather than investing in solutions. Most perniciously, much of the fossil fuel lobby’s efforts to obstruct action is focused on audiences in the Global North, where climate change still has relatively lower salience, compared to vulnerable regions, such as Africa and South Asia, which are feeling far worse climate impacts.
However, a deep understanding of Earth’s atmosphere has encouraged a clear understanding of the dangers of climate change. The weight of scientific evidence, along with the increasing manifestations of climate impacts all around the world is building political salience and boosting climate up the agenda.
How is the global community rising to the challenge of governing long problems?
UN Secretary General Guterres has called a ‘Summit of the Future’ to be held this coming September, as a key moment for world leaders to discuss how to better meet the needs of the present, while also preparing for the challenges of the future.
This is a key inflection point for leaders to consider whether multilateralism, as we know it, is fit-for-purpose for coordinating action on global issues. One of the principal themes at the Summit is how, as a global society, we can upgrade the governance of our common environment. Currently, planetary boundaries are at full stretch on climate and nature, and government systems were not designed to deal with that. There is a major question here about how environmental governance can and should change, and how quickly it can be adapted to manage the problem of institutional lag.
A key outcome of the Summit, which I am working towards, will be a Declaration on Future Generations, which is a chance for countries to commit to safeguard the interests of future generations, alongside our own. My hope is that this will catalyse widespread institutional reform. To encourage global reform, we first need goals to be set, and support to be given to countries that need it. That’s where a UN Declaration, alongside other implementation tools like a Special Envoy for Future Generations, or a UN Forum to encourage knowledge sharing, can help to re-orient governance towards the long-term.
The Summit should send a clear signal that we need to do much more to mainstream long-term governance into every single system, including climate change, health, and everything else. And it should give countries the practical tools and ideas for achieving that.
About 40% of national constitutions have some kind of reference to future generations, so it’s already a widespread norm, but it’s not a one-size-fits all. All countries should consider what it means for them to operationalize the protection and flourishing of future people. What’s fascinating, in a world where there is so much disagreement, is that many of us intuitively agree that we should leave the world in a better place for the people who come after us. I think there’s something very hopeful about that.
Watch a snippet of his interview below.
Biography: Thomas Hale, Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford
Thomas Hale’s research explores how we can manage transnational problems effectively and fairly. He seeks to explain how political institutions evolve – or not – to face the challenges raised by globalisation and interdependence, with a particular emphasis on environmental, economic and health issues. He holds a PhD in Politics from Princeton University, a master’s degree in Global Politics from the London School of Economics, and an AB in public policy from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.
A US national, Professor Hale has studied and worked in Argentina, China and Europe. His most recent book is Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time (Princeton, 2024). Professor Hale co-leads the Net Zero Tracker.
To inspire associations around the globe to prioritise their climate policy engagement, Race to Zero highlights two businesses and associations who are in the driving seat of ambitious climate policy.
To ensure SMEs in the Race to Zero can climate proof their businesses, governments need to provide them the right kind of incentives.
To ensure integrity and accelerate meaningful progress towards halving global emissions by 2030, Race to Zero is a green demand aggregation initiative i.e., showing governments that the private sector is wanting investment in green solutions like green cement, green steel and climate solutions.
To ensure integrity and accelerate meaningful progress towards halving global emissions by 2030, Race to Zero encourages members to align external policy and engagement, including membership in associations, with the goal of halving emissions by 2030.
