We’ve been running Doughnut Economics workshops for almost 4 years for residents, schools, the Surrey Hills National Landscape Board and more. But the average person on the street still knows little about the concept, so for ‘Global Doughnut Days’ this year, alongside our Doughnut Economics events we’re taking a dive into the subject with this blog in the hope that it gets a few more people interested.
If you don’t know who we are, ZERO is a charity that’s focused on tackling local issues through practical solutions - such as the high air pollution levels in Guildford, sewage in the river Wey, and the really poor thermal inefficiency of Surrey homes. The projects that we run are solutions to these pressing local issues, but equally importantly, they contribute to tackling global scale issues such as nature loss and climate change.
It's this strategy which makes Doughnut Economics a great way to look at problem solving, because it focuses on how the people and places in our local area can thrive, whilst playing a key role in ensuring we hand a habitable planet to our kids and future generations.
Through our High Street premises, our projects and events, we spend a lot of time engaging local residents and organisations, so we spend a fair bit of time talking about Doughnut Economics through our day-to-day activities. ‘Doughnut Economics’ is definitely a phrase that’s frequently met with a baffled look when the other person hasn’t heard the term before. The two words don’t even really fit together - and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s something to do with the early noughties craze of googlewhacking!
The name isn’t the only thing that can be confusing to the uninitiated - why for example do health practitioners involved with the Doughnut spend so much time worrying about climate change, and why are environmental policy makers worried about affordable housing?
Well the short answer is that most of the issues we face are interlinked, and to truly tackle the problems we face we need to do it in a holistic, joined up way, ensuring we avoid unintended knock-on consequences from our decision making. That's the essence of Doughnut Economics, and what we're going to touch on.
Even if you’ve not heard of Doughnut Economics before now, you're probably aware of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. Work on the SDGs began way back in the 1990s, and the framework was adopted by all member nations in 2015, with a simple goal - create a more equitable balance between countries across the world in healthcare, education, and economic growth.
At it's core the SDG framework seeks to ensure that all humans, regardless of the lottery of where they are born, have their basic needs met. This is the first fundamental component of the Doughnut Economics model; implementing decisions which ensure all basic human needs are met. And this principle forms the first component of the Doughnut - the social foundation, or the threshold at which we can meet all of these needs.
Now you might be thinking, ‘well it can’t be that hard - with the political will we could easily solve these issues’. And to some extent you’d be right, but let’s think about it for a second; how easy it is to solve these problems, ensuring that everyone has access to clean water, healthcare, education and so on, with the systems we currently have in place?
Surrey Hills Natinal Landscape Board mapping out issues in maybe the largest Doughnut used for a DEAL workshop! The Beuys Oaks installation by renowned artists Ackroyd & Harvey, at Surrey County Council's Woodhatch Place. Footage from Cllr Paul Deach.
Let's take energy for example, and ensuring everyone on the planet has heat and light. We’ve got a number of countries running entirely on 100% renewable energy, and about 20 running at 90% renewable energy - but that’s not everyone. In fact the global level is much lower, at around 28%, dragged down by the likes of the US who are huge consumers but only at around 20% renewables. So in our current system, increasing energy provision means more greenhouse gases and guarantees that we pass climate system tipping points.
Food is another good example - our current farming systems in large part rely on intensive agriculture. Whilst the move toward regenerative farming methods is growing, the vast majority of food production across the globe results in the loss of precious habitat, the creation of monocultures which wipe out biodiversity, loss of carbon sinks, and as a result create a huge stress on nature.
Clearly then, there's a problem. On a planet of finite resources, and which responds to human activity, we can't simply continue to consume more. Constant growth on a planet of finite resource invariably leads to collapse of crucial systems that support us.
And that brings us on to the next key point....
In 2009, earth systems scientists came together to define the critical earth systems which we need to ensure stay stable so that humanity can thrive. Staying focused on climate change for a moment, (as the planetary boundary most people are familiar with), of course the earth has been hotter / colder in the past. But the thing is, we’ve never existed through any of those periods as a civilisation. In fact, the entire reason we have managed to settle and advance as a species so quickly, is due to the very stable climate of the last 10,000 years, or the Holocene.
But we’re no longer in that stable period. We’ve accelerated an increase of global average temperatures way beyond that stable period. The way earth system scientists describe this is in terms of 'crossing planetary boundaries'.
But climate change is just one of these earth systems. There’s actually 9 of them - and we’re doing a pretty crap job at keeping most of them stable! In fact, we’ve breached 6 of the 9 designated planetary boundaries. This is the second fundamental component of the Doughnut, the outer ring which represents the threshold of these boundaries, which we call the Ecological Ceiling.
Hopefully by now you've seen the obvious tension...we need to somehow balance our ability to 1) meet the needs of our fellow human beings, whilst 2) simultaneously avoiding using so much resource that we exceed planetary limits. In our current economic model, not only can we not assess or monitor this, there's literally not even any consideration of this problem.
And this is the brilliant simplicity of the Doughnut. It marries the Sustainable Development Goals with earth’s key systems in a way that allows us to visualise resource use and its impact on our communities and ecosystems.
Imagine the very centre point of the Doughnut to be the point of zero resource us. As we move away from the centre we need to ensure we use enough resources to meet everyone’s basic needs - the right to fresh water, education, access to nature etc etc - but not so much that we risk tipping earth's systems into collapse.
In other words, as the Doughnut Describes it, we need to ensure we cross the social foundation, meeting everyone's needs, without breaching the ecological ceiling. The green space, or the dough of the doughnut, is therefore the sweet spot, which DEAL terms 'the safe and just space for humanity'.
Seems like common sense, eh? Yet as we said, both these overarching considerations are almost entirely absent from current economic decision making. And there’s a pretty straightforward explanation for all of this - namely, that our current economic model ignores the fact that all economics takes place within the biosphere. Our economic system impacts every living being on earth, yet when policy is drawn up this is completely ignored.
A significant contributor to this issue is our use of GDP (gross domestic product) as the marker of how successful an economy is. But GDP only measures goods and services, so how on earth can we continue to use it in isolation as a metric of success when it completely ignores every other factor of life in a country - the health, education, connection etc of its people?
We include no measure of how equitably that wealth is distributed, and as a result decisions and policy are made which might increase the GDP of a country, but are increasingly only benefiting a tiny proportion of its residents, with a handful of people getting immeasurably richer whilst the population at large suffers (and this, during the ongoing cost of living crisis, is often the thing most people identify with in 2024 when discussing Doughnut Economics.).
It’s a bonkers scenario. But when a system allows a small minority of people to centralise most of the wealth, and that wealth can be used to further influence decision making, it becomes extremely obvious why we’re stuck in a status quo that fails almost everyone whilst a handful of weirdos get to play with actual space rockets as toys!
Thinking about economics through the lens of the Doughnut means that rather than simply judging the success of countries based on ‘growth’ alone, we can instead measure how well we are providing for all our residents, fairly and justly, without using so many resources that we risk collapse of ecosystems, runaway climate change, or air-pollution related illness.
ZERO's Doughnut Economics Journey
Guildford, where we're based, is also the home of Uni of Surrey, where the Centre for the Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP) is based. In fact the first event we ever held as a charity was to host Professor Tim Jackson, author of the book Prosperity Without Growth, which discusses several of the same issues as Doughnut Economics.
So when we launched our very first premises back in 2021, and Great Big Green Week rolled around, we kicked it off with a day of economics - done in a fun way. As well as hosting CUSP, and an EN-Roads workshop, this was the day we kicked off our Doughnut Journey.
In fact, recently released from lockdown, we hosted the first ever in-person Doughnut Economics Action Lab workshop (DEAL) at Guildford Borough council chamber. Bringing together community leaders, councillors, policy makers, the session was facilitated fantastically by DEAL’s Rob Shorter, and marked the start of our journey to pushing the Doughnut around Surrey.
Since this first workshop, we've run Step Into The Doughnut and The 4 Lenses workshops multiple times across the county, working with a number of organisations. This year we have used Step Into The Doughnut for the Surrey Hills National Landscape board, to help them consider how their 75 year plan should shape up, taking into account the obvious needs to protect a treasured landscape, but also how to counter the less obvious issues like lack of affordable housing in the Surrey Hills, which means that finding people to work the farms, landscape and local businesses can prove really challenging.
We also co-led the event What's Stopping Us this year, based at the University of Surrey and part of Surrey Climate Commission's ongoing engagement work. ZERO trained up a host of facilitators to run the 4 Lenses Workshop, and following an abridged run through of Step Into The Doughnut, each facilitator took one of 9 tables and mapped out problems we face in Surrey and how to implement solutions, whilst helping to paint a picture of what participants felt Surrey's role should be in tackling global scale crises.
ZERO trained several facilitators for a collaborative event bringing together residents and staff from multiple sectors for an event at Uni of Surrey (video credit: Institute for Sustainability, UoS)
What Questions Does The Doughnut Leave Us With
It's really important to note here that this is not a silver bullet. The Doughnut offers us an opportunity to employ systems thinking to create a holistic approach to the solutions that could work for an organisation, a city, area, or county.
Does it mean an end to 'growth'. Not necessarily. Not all growth is the same - for example, growth in construction driven by a switch towards hemp over cement, or from retrofitting our thermally inefficient homes could have a net positive effect. The point is that employing a model like the Doughnut to assess policies like this means that we can do it in a joined-up way and assess the unintended consequences across social and environmental aspects before we do anything, not once we've already p0ushed a system to breaking point.
We can also raise questions about where we set the limits within the model. Are the boundaries rigidly set? Well for the planetary boundaries, yes to some extent they are. Many of the smartest people in the world have worked to define the levels at which the likelihood of triggering earth system tipping points kicks in, so we've got a pretty good estimate of the limits we're working within on the ecological ceiling. But for the social foundation we might have a fairly different view of what an acceptable limit of what for example the poverty line is classed as, both between countries and even between cities in the same county.
That then invariably takes us full circle and poses the question for people who have been working in departments that make these decisions for years of whether economic policy should be defining what these limits are, or how to act on them. But this is exactly the point, our current system has led us to the point of historic inequality, nature loss, pollution in our oceans etc, because these policy decisions remain so isolated from each other. The Doughnut presents an opportunity to begin creating a new systems thinking approach in which social, economic and environmental policy are not separate problems, they're all just different faces of the same problem, and if we are to tackle the huge scale issues that we face then this approach of bringing together the social and environmental consequences of our decisions has to be a step in the right direction.
So how, in practice, do you implement this? Well how you adopt and implement Doughnut principles will be dependent on the organisation / city / country. In the UK, probably the most common sense approach to Doughnut-based decision making so far has been employed by Cornwall County Council, who created a decision wheel based on the Doughnut to assess how positive or negative the impact of certain policies would be. This is an obvious practical way to join up council decisions to avoid unintended consequences elsewhere, and gas been embraced across the council.
As a result, decisions are made under each of the council’s strategic priorities, helping to align priority work under the vision for the county to ensure people and place thrive . Compare this to Surrey for example, which as a tier 1 local authority has very similar strategic priorities to Cornwall - but doesn't make decisions particularly well in the context of the strategic priorities. Instead, the 7 different directorates are somewhat isolated from each other in terms of decision making, which increases the risk of either duplication of work, not involving the best staff in a project, or worst of all, setting back one of the other strategic priorities (for example by pushing for growth in the local economy in a way which might seem sensible but could have a hugely negative impact on local species or on small independents run by locals.)
How do we begin to implement these principles in some countries when others aren't? What would that look like like in such a global world, and even if we had competent governments with the motivation to do this, how could we do it in a fair way? How do we address the massive overconsumption of the richest countries on earth? Would this need to be married with a structure like contraction and convergence to ensure that the 'safe and just space for humanity' was equally safe and just for all countries?
One thing we definitely know is that currently, 'fairness' is definitely not part of the equation. Especially when t comes to climate change. The countries and people least responsible for the position we are now in, will be likely to feel the sharpest edge of climate impacts.
And without governments that are willing to act, it brings us back to the first point of this article; local action to drive global change. It looks increasingly unlikely we will disrupt the status quo without huge grassroots action, pushing local authorities and governments from the bottom up to move at the pace which communities demand, to ensure they have a secure future.
How Can You Learn About Doughnut Economics
We've not even scratched the surface here - in fact the Doughnut is based on 7 key principles which we've not really even touched on! And we would highly recommend you get stuck into learning about the Doughnut; it's great fun, has loads of potential for meeting new people and building community, and it's hugely interesting if you're starting a journey toward a more systems thinking approach. And importantly, it gives you a starting point with which to push local decision makers to act in a more joined-up way, using what means you have to push for a future model that puts people and place at its very centre.
We run workshops frequently for residents, schools, charities, and they're free of charge. We love them and giving them brings great ideas for local solutions that help tackle much wider problems.
We can also refer you to a paid workshop for your business, t0 help you explore Doughnut principles as part of your wider plan and targets.
Schools: steph@zerocarbonguildford.org
Businesses: info@surreysbn.org
Other: info@zerocarbonguildford.org
Borrow Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics from our community library.
DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS EVENTS
Step Into The Doughnut Workshop
Thurs 7th November, 7pm - 9pm
ZERO, 168 High Street, Guildford. GU1 3HW
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