GAIA Workshop at SPE Europe Regional Section Officers Meeting in Budapest
by Alison Isherwood (SPE London Section, Gaia Net Zero Committee) and Joschka Röth (SPE German Section, Gaia Regional Liaison Europe)
“What are your daily limits and limitations at home, at your workplace and on the way between?” With this leading question, Alison Isherwood (SPE London Section, Net Zero Committee) and Joschka Röth (SPE German Section, Gaia Regional Liaison for Europe) started their Gaia Workshop at the Novotel Budapest Danube Hotel in Budapest (Hungary) on 25th September 2021. The ultimate aim of the workshop: participants should be able to communicate confidently with everyone about sustainability and planetary limits.
After the workshop participants introduced each other in small groups, they brainstormed about the leading question and provided a list of interesting answers:
| Limits |
Limitations |
|---|---|
| Water flow rate |
Water consumption |
| Paved road |
Traffic, driving speed |
| Battery / fuel tank capacity |
Style of driving |
| Time |
Planning, scheduling (Don’t be late!) |
| Money |
Spending behavior |
| Electricity |
Energy consumption, budgeting |
| Plastic or other goods & materials |
Buying habits |
| Physical power |
Daily routine, energy budgeting |
| Influence |
Envy vs. open mindedness |
Most of the mentioned concepts on the left side are representing resources and most terms on the right side are related to individual behavior and budgeting of resources.
Joschka continued to describe the concept of Gaia, which originates in the ancient Greek primordial goddess (Gaia = Mother of all life / Earth), developed to the Gaia Hypothesis (Earth = synergistic and self-regulating, complex system) and today – from SPE’s perspective – represents the dramatic tension created between the parts of the earth’s system: human life on the surface that depends upon high intensity sub-surface energy resources.
Since the Earth’s physical boundaries and limited resources obviously define the current limits to economic growth, the list above could therefore be easily extended by other limited resources like fossil fuels, minerals, natural capital (soil, water, atmosphere …) and food.
Before Alison and Joschka started diving deeper into the detailed framework and resources of the SPE Gaia Sustainability Program itself (https://www.spe.org/en/gaia/), workshop participants discussed the “Limits to Growth” theory, which was published already in the early 1970’s by Dennis Meadows (Club of Rome). From today’s perspective the inverse relationship of industrial output and availability of resources seems still remarkably true. While the growing global population is the result of our progressing industrial output including growing availability of food, the consumption of our limited resources becomes more and more problematic. With business as usual we are very likely and very soon running into a scenario of high pollution, enormous greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, increasing frequency of extreme weather events and collapse of entire supply chains – a global economic, environmental and social crisis. Only adjustments in our behavior, a shift to a more sustainable mindset and a transition to a circular economy might lead to a stabilized world, which will be worth living in for future generations.
To solve this huge, socially complex problem without overwhelming people’s ability to address them, it is possible for individuals such as ourselves and SPE sections to initially aim for “small wins”, since they are immediate, tangible and controllable (Weick, 1984) in a bottoms-up approach. Several small wins will then trigger motion forces that favor another, larger win. Hence, Alison shared some examples of activity in the SPE London Net Zero Gaia Committee, where the Gaia concept was integrated in their programming to help members understand the bigger picture and required budgeting and learn necessary skills for a more sustainable oil and gas industry and wider energy industry. Alison underlined the importance of bottoms-up action and encouraged the workshop participants to support “tempered radicals” and to learn from “positive deviants” to implement small wins. Each Net Zero event and each Gaia Talk represents a small win on the way to the ultimate aim: the oil and gas industry as the engine room of the energy transition while ensuring being on the right side of history with a sustained social license to operate.
In this context it is important to provide O&G industry individual members with the means to align their actions and the future energy system with sustainable development and to scale existing efforts to add new ideas and actions that rise to the scale of the urgency of the planet's sustainability challenges. The SPE Gaia Sustainability Program aims to produce pathways for action (innovation, measuring what matters, listening & communication) and guiding principles (aggregate, engage, collaborate) to ensure impact on defined priorities of sustainable development (energy transition, regenerate natural capital, social responsibilities).
The workshop finished with a discussion about why and how Gaia is important for us - personally and professionally, and what might be the most powerful show-stoppers for Gaia?
While internal resistance and stubbornness were identified as the biggest risks for the success of the SPE Gaia Sustainability Program, the most important opportunity for influence could be related to the fact that the EU is failing to reach the agreed climate goals: current policies will only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050, which is far away from Net Zero.
This time period before the remaining gaps in the EU/UK legislation are fixed could be the perfect opportunity for SPE and the entire European O&G industry – with a focus on emissions management, future fuels and energy efficiency – to jump in, to show and to prove that their knowledge, technology, experience and social commitment is relevant and that we are an important part of the solution. This will rely on us overcoming the other potential show-stopper identified by workshop participants, our ability to communicate and influence those outside the oil and gas industry, to convince them of our commitment to sustainability and our dedication to be part of the solution.