Four questions about one transition

What is it built from? What does it draw on? How is it counted? Does it hold? Each programme takes one question. The projects shown are examples of current work, not a complete list.

We start where the evidence is: the carbon value of land and forests, the impacts that fall outside an accounting boundary, the hidden trade-offs in low-carbon materials. These measurements serve a wider question. Efficiency removes the reserves, buffers and slack that let a system absorb a shock. A transition that cuts emissions but leaves societies fragile has not succeeded. Our programmes move from the first question to the second.

The programmes

Read in order, they follow a transition from its materials to the system that must hold together.

  1. P1

    Programme 1 · What is the transition built from?

    Industrial transitions

    Which technologies and materials actually decarbonize construction and heavy industry, and which only appear to?

    Cement, concrete, timber, structural stone; technologies, sectors, public roadmapsCompleted work, 2022 to 20263 projects

    Read the programme
  2. P2

    Programme 2 · What does the transition draw on?

    Land and ecosystem transitions

    What is the true carbon cost of using land and biomass, and how should competing uses be arbitrated?

    Food, forests and wood products, land, biomass and ocean; product to continentBenchmark frozen; forest results provisional; European project ongoing3 projects

    Read the programme
  3. P3

    Programme 3 · How is the transition counted?

    Measuring transitions

    What do accounting standards omit, how uncertain are their figures, and what risk does that carry?

    Assets, activities and the standards that assess them; sector-agnosticConcept and working paper; methods tested in other programmes3 projects

    Read the programme
  4. P4

    Programme 4 · Does the transition hold?

    Systemic transitions

    Why do efficient systems become fragile, and what does it take, and cost, to make them robust?

    Self-organizing systems; national economies, Canada as the first caseTheory: provisional results. Economy model: planned3 projects

    Read the programme

How the projects connect

No project stands alone. Methods developed in one become the starting point of another. Select a project to see what it builds on and what it leads to.

24 cement andconcretetechnologiesassessedIndustrialecology forconstructionThe full climatecost of foodForest carboncost of woodproductsLand, biomass andocean in EuropeThe accountinggapWhy efficientsystems becomefragileThe price ofslackP1INDUSTRIAL TRANSITIONSP2LAND AND ECOSYSTEM TRANSITIONSP3MEASURING TRANSITIONSP4SYSTEMIC TRANSITIONS

The connections in words

  • The carbon opportunity cost of land, developed on food, is used in the forest work, the European land-use project, the cement assessment and the accounting-gap study.
  • The forest work feeds the European land-use project and the accounting-gap study, and supplies the timber-against-concrete comparison.
  • The construction work the lab started with led to the cement and concrete assessment, which is the first application of the accounting-gap study.
  • The cement assessment's systems archetypes are the fragility traps the economy model must reproduce.
  • The theory of robust systems supplies the metrics for the economy model and a planned robustness layer for food foresight.

Under all four: our models

Every programme rests on models. We build our own, rebuild published ones so they can be verified, and couple models with partner institutions into integrated models. All follow the same standards: predictions before runs, uncertainty carried through, failures published.

How we work

All projects

Browse current projects by programme, method, status or scale.

All projects