 Hello everyone and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast. I'm your host, Ari Seed from Metabolism of Cities. In this podcast we interview thinkers, researchers, activists, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. Today's episode is special. Today we celebrate the 30th episode of the Circular Metabolism Podcast and for that I'm wearing my favorite shirt. And over these 29 episodes I spoke and learned with so well I learned from very intelligent people much more than I am and how to move forward from our current mess. I talked about urban ecology, urban metabolism, circular economy, social ecology, de-growth, post-growth and today we're going to talk about another fascinating topic that might become our compass for the numerous challenges that cities face. But today is also special because I get to talk with the fantastic Kate Reavos. Although we've never talked before, I know already we have some things in common and one of them is our love for donuts as it was my favorite treat when I was a kid and I grew up in Greece. So the other ones you're going to discover later on in the episode. To talk about donuts I have the author of the international best-seller book Donut Economics, Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. Kate is an economist and over the past 25 years has worked with Oxfam, UNDP, the Ministry of Trade and Industry of Zanzibar and she currently teaches at the Oxford University and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Kate is also the co-founder of the Donut Economics Action Lab, an online collaborative laboratory that brings together tools and stories about how to transform this radical idea into transformative action. With all that being said, thanks a lot Kate for being part of this podcast. My pleasure and very happy to join you on the 30th edition. For the people that perhaps do not know you, leave under a rock. Could you perhaps give a short introduction of who you are and what you did? Sure. So gosh, I studied economics at university. It turned out to be not what I needed. I walked away, there was climate breakdown, financial meltdown, an economist started saying, oh we need to rewrite economics to reflect financial realities. And I thought really, are we only going to rewrite economics for that? And I came back towards economics and wanted to be part of the movement of people who are flipping it on its head and starting economics with the values that we hold dear. How about the rights of all people? How about the integrity of this one living planet? So I drew a picture that looked like a donut. So the only difference between us is you actually ate them. I don't eat them. The only donut that's any good for us is the one that's conceptual. Yeah, and I published it as a book that you just shared and I have to say it's had so much more traction in the world than I could have ever possibly imagined. Which tells me people are hungry for change and are looking for transformation. So I believe these are the times. Yeah, yeah. And well, I can imagine very, well, weird or difficult to live amongst this traction. I mean, as you say, people are hungry and you said it from the get-go. This is an image and more than just words. We need images and we don't need to be against something. We need to be drawn into something else. So you have plenty of circles or donuts behind you as well. What is so attractive about this image? I even have one right here. The benefits of lockdown, right? You have everything on a stick. So the donut is like a compass for human prosperity in the 21st century. It's one way of envisioning the future of the world we want. So if you imagine humanity's use of Earth's resources since we're here talking about metabolism, the use of Earth's resources radiating out from the center. It means the hole in the middle is a place where people are left falling short on the essentials of life. It's where people don't have the resources they need for health and education, food and housing, income, transport, connectivity, political voice and equality. Leave nobody in the hole. Fine. But as we bring everybody out of the hole, there's also an outer limit here. Don't go over this ecological ceiling because that is the where we collectively start to put so much pressure on this planet's life-supporting systems that we begin to kick our planetary home out of balance. That's where we cause climate breakdown and we acidify the oceans. We create a hole in the ozone layer. We cause critical loss of biodiversity and break down the web of life. So in the simplest of terms, the goal of the doughnut is to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. And the first thing it does actually is transform the shape in our minds of what we think progress looks like. Because the 20th century told us in every economics textbook and every political speech and the pages of the newspapers, here we are, this was the shape of progress. You have all your props ready for it. I have all my toys. Hey, if you're going to be locked down in your office for a year, you might as well have some toys. So there's never ending growth. It goes the ceiling off the screen up through the ceiling. Nobody asks what happens when we hit the ceiling and go through. This was the shape of progress. And we need to transform that. And that's what the doughnut is part of. And as you just said, it's one thing to protest and critique what's wrong, what's wrong with the old, what's wrong with you to be fine. But we're never going to transform the world by critiquing things. As Buckminster Fuller said, you never change things by fighting the existing reality to change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. So I think of the diagrams that I was taught in my economics textbooks, I think of them like intellectual graffiti, very hard to scrub out. So stop scrubbing. Let's paint them over with an amazing mural of something actually better. And that's the power of pictures. They give us a new worldview. And that's what the doughnut aims to do. And I think when I first drew the doughnut diagram back in 2012, it was published in the run up to the Rio plus 20 conference on sustainable development. And so many people said to me, you know, I've always thought of sustainable development like this. I've just, I've just never seen the picture. And I could see that it was empowering to people to have a picture in the hand to have something to point to, to feel that they could visualize this vision of the world they wanted to create. And that's what drove me to to leave my job at Oxfam and write the book as the most effective act of advocacy I could do at the time. Yeah. And especially I think, so you mentioned, I think, I don't know if it was in Rio or in another summit where a lot of people had this balance conception of life, like Pachamama and all of that. But then some other people said, well, this, this is wishy-washy. We need like evidence based models. And you kind of reconciled with two words, the, the, the spiritual word and the analytical words. And I think, well, was it two, three years ago that the planetary boundaries concept was, or was it in 2008? I don't remember. So it came out really recently, just before that, right? So really recently as like, so I have some dinosaurs behind me, right? So we've got long time in the room. So yes, humanity's beginning to understand the dynamics of this incredible, delicately balanced living planet on which we depend is really recent. The planetary boundaries work was published first in 2009. It's only a decade. Like these guys over here will tell you that's tiny, nothing. It's only a decade that humanity's become so, oh, what, what might be the life supporting systems of this planet? I mean, if you, if you think that humanity for over 1000 years has investigated the dynamics of the living body and understood that our bodies have complex systems, the respiratory system, the digestive system, muscular system, nervous system, and that our health depends on staying within balance, have enough food, but not too much have enough temperature, but not too much enough oxygen, but not too much enough exercise, but not too much life thrives in balance. And if we can take what we know from bodily health and take that now to planetary health, which is a science only a decade old in that sense, we're just at the beginning of this journey. So yes, it was actually in the run up to the Rio plus 20 conference that somebody said to me, go and present your diagram to all the embassies of the negotiating countries at Rio, which was a very strange experience. I went to New York and had meetings at all these embassies. And what did I have to show them? A picture of doughnut. And I went in there thinking, I think I think I'm crazy. And I remember the Argentine, the Argentina was the head of the G 77 at the time. And the Argentine representative, who I showed it to, she was this very powerful negotiator. And I remember thinking, what is she going to think? And she said, I have always thought of sustainable development like this. She said, go and show this to the Europeans. I want to know what they think. And the next day I had a meeting with the European group of people from lots of different countries. And I was in there and they pulled down their whiteboard. Right. What have you got to show and rejected on the wall? It's a doughnut. And one of the people there, actually an English guy, I remember, he said, oh, he says, yeah, you know, the Latin Americans, they took about this pachamama. He did this. He went, this pachamama, like fluffy, fluffy, you know. But he said, but I see that this is a kind of Western way of saying the same thing. And that was actually a really powerful point he'd made. I hadn't realized that this shape of two circles was connected to a worldview of pachamama or Yin Yang or the Buddhist Endless Knot or the Celtic Double Spiral. I mean, there are indigenous symbols from all over the world that echo this shape of dynamic balance. I hadn't realized that. But he made a very profound point that if we connect through shape, sometimes words and labels and jargon and terminology totally gets in the way. But as shape goes deeper somehow into our conscious and we think, yeah, that's balance, that's health. So, yes, it's fascinating how we can use the power of shape to bridge and otherwise divide. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it really helps to explain as well. I mean, when we talk about urban metabolism, it's a metaphor, circular economy, it's a metaphor, things are, I mean, I think they also draw it interdisciplinary because they're easily understood like a metaphor is kind of a collaboration lubricant, if you will, of different disciplines that kind of see the same thing, but in a different way. So they have their own knowledge, their own a priori, if you will. And they say, okay, yeah, I can understand this from and out of nowhere, you have collaboration like the Argentinian and the English person could collaborate out of nowhere, because never before they would say, oh yeah, let's work on balance. Right. So, yes, and let me just pick you up on that. So as you say, you use a metaphor in your work, and it's a beautiful example that in fact, we live by metaphors, hang on, where is it? This is one of my favorite books. I don't know if you know it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're writing an article on metaphors right now. It's funny. Yeah, there we go. So metaphors are profound in language, because the world is really complex. And we're not actually often trained and taught to see the complexity of dynamic systems and society's dynamic systems. And so to help us understand them, we use metaphors. Well, it's a bit like this, think of it like that, right? And we use that throughout human language. And that's what this book does. And one of the most powerful metaphors is the idea that forwards and up is good. Why are you looking so down? Did you have a set back? Cheer up. Things may be moving forward, right? So forward and up is good. No wonder we love economic growth so easily. Forward and up is good, right? But the metaphor that you use, I think is a brilliant one, metabolism, because it's bringing us back to this question of bodily health. My bodily health depends upon me having a healthy metabolism. And recognizing that I'm an open system, I have inputs and outputs and a through flow that supports my well being. Now, you're precisely taking from what we understand at the level of bodily health. And you're now using that metaphor to understand urban health. And people can go, Oh, I get that. It's like an organism. It has a through flow. And we need to think about the quality of that food and where it's going. So it's a really lovely way, again, of using our intuitive, almost understanding of our bodily health and taking that to another level. But it's funny because so I'm wondering what you think about this. So in urban metabolism, we have many streams of understanding or schools of thought, like we have the people that are part of the urban ecology stream, other parts of the political ecology, others are called more from the industrial ecology. So, you know, whatever that is, but there are different intellectual families within it. And they don't. So they create boundaries, sorry, islands of knowledge. And, you know, they're not very collaborative sometimes. And with circular economy, I feel it's a bit the same. So there is now like a family of circular economy that's extremely pro gross. There is another one that's extremely technical. And let's figure out the waste regulations. There's another one. Let's start by closing the tap first, and then we'll figure out how to, you know, bring the water back to the sink, let's say. But in donut economics, there's no such, I don't know, it seems so clear that there's no division or perhaps it's, is it too young to have divisions or many times it's because there's a lack of a definition, a good definition that everybody agrees on. Yet for the donut, I think that everybody agrees on, or it's very clear, you said what it is. And I don't think we can argue with the definition, right? Well, the definition of the donut, I mean, this is the goal. I mean, you can argue about what is good food, how much is enough, you can argue about where these foundation boundaries are. And that's an ongoing conversation, I think. But it claims that's that's what we're aiming to do. And then there are principles and dynamics for getting there. We need to go from degenerative design to regenerative. And the circular economy will be a part of that. We need to go from divisive economies to distributive economies that are far more equitable. I think I'm going to be I'm going to be honest, I think donut economics may still be too young for those divisions to open up. One of the areas you just said some people in in circular economy are really pro-growth. And I think, yeah, I think there's a real risk that some of the most powerful ideas get captured by a very mainstream and familiar business mindset that still is in service to growth, and assumes that growth can and shouldn't will be endless, and that the purpose of business is to reap financial return. And then there's a whole other field of people saying, well, no, the business is a really great vehicle and means by which to transform our economies. And maybe business, yeah, of course, business needs to make a profit. Otherwise, it can't open the doors next week and next month and next year. But it's not here to make profit. The profit is a condition in order to serve the purpose. And what we're trying to do is transform our economy and create a circular economy. I meet people on both sides of that divide. And both of them might be doing, say, I'm doing circular economy. I'm using circular economy because it's great for our profit margins. We're saving so much and we've entered new markets. And someone else saying, we're doing circular economy because this is how to transform the economy. That's what we're in service of. We're using business as a vehicle. Totally different designs. And I think people coming with a very different goal. Now, they could try and do that around donut economics, but we've actually been very, very careful with the donut because we think the greatest risk to it is indeed greenwash. And so we have, right now, we have a pretty strict condition around business. We say, businesses, you are welcome to use the donut. If you go to our platform, donuteconomics.org, there is a tool there called when business meets the donut. It is a tool that you could use as a workshop in your company. It's a tool for internal reflection. And there's a lot of it that needs to be done in lots of companies. What you can't do is stick it on your website, stick it in your marketing, go and talk about it publicly. Because this is not about running around saying we're doing the donut. It's about branding. If you want to use it, use it internally. In the future, we're going to be, in fact, we're hiring right now to bring somebody into our team to be our business lead. And in the future, we're going to open that box and start working with different kinds of enterprises. And I'm really happy to talk more deeply about different kinds of enterprises. But it's really important for these ideas, be it circle economy or donut economics, not to get captured by mainstream business that wants to extend its life and will grab the latest toy gadget, cool idea and just swallow it up for breakfast, spit it out, talk about metabolism and the metabolism of using operate ideas and move on to the next one and destroy them in the process. So we say, when a disruptive idea meets business as usual, by when the donut meets mainstream business, something's going to get transformed. And our job is to make sure it's not. So we send a very high bar for engaging with companies. Yeah, I was, that's also when I was seeing all of the use and the adoption of donut economics by governments, by cities, and now with all of this, I'm so afraid that this is going to happen, this greenwashing is going to happen and all of this. But of course, well, at least you have your hands dirty, you're there, you're doing the thing, you're defending the concept because there is a person behind it. In many others concepts as well, you know, it's get thrown around and re-appropriated by different people and it's no ones. Well, of course, you don't, I think you want, you did this for the word and not for yourself, this concept. And so I also imagine that you're very happy that people appropriate this concept. But I can imagine how, you know, difficult it must be that you see other people holding or, you know, torturing your own baby sometimes that you're like, yeah, but that's not what I thought at the beginning. So it's a really interesting challenge and dance that we're making. We launched Donut Economics Action Lab because when my book came out in 2017, I'll give a talk and then afterwards, there'd always be a little cluster of people who say, yeah, but I'm actually doing this. I'm teaching this in my classroom. I'm discussing this in the board in my company. I'm taking this to the town hall. I'm bringing this to the mayor. We're doing this in our community. So people wanted to do it and it made it clear to me that, okay, this is asking for an organization. This is asking to bring these change makers together so they can connect, learn from each other and be inspired by each other. And so I found a co-founder, Colotta Sands, and we set up Donut Economics Action Lab. It's an online platform. Anybody can join, any individual can join and become a member. There are tools. We put them all in the commons so anybody can use these tools so they can't appropriate them, I hope, but they can use them and adapt them and apply them. And we ask that in return for us sharing these ideas openly, we ask for the human quality of reciprocity that you share back. If you make an innovation with them, you share it back. If you have an experience using them, you share it back as a story. So that's the openness. Now we have to balance that with integrity. That you can't just take it and do anything with it. You can't take out the social foundation and put business needs and interests in the middle. We actually say you can't use it to declare a new kind of capitalism because actually we think that's lazy and we need to really deeply ask ourselves what are the structures that underlie what we call capitalism because those should be up for changing too. So we want to use it to deeply challenge and question our economies. So we're constantly balancing openness with integrity and that business policy I just told you about is the tightest line of integrity that we've got. But yes, cities and places are using it sometimes calling us up and saying we'd like to work with you. Sometimes we found out on Twitter that they've adopted the doughnuts as their city goal. So it's like, okay, how are you going to be doing this? And we're in a dance of at the moment working with that principle of high trust, trusting that people and these are often city councillors or deputy mayors are they're putting themselves out there adopting this concept. They're pushing the ambition of their place and we trust their intention. Now they may then be working in a context that wants to rub the corners of it, that wants to soften it. And we will work with them in that context and say what does it mean to hold yourself to the standard of the donor? What are your indicators and are you going to show year on year that you're coming into the donor? For example, I know that City of Amsterdam, which adopted the doughnut in April 2020 in the height of the COVID crisis. I know that in the autumn of this year they're going to hold themselves to account on it and talk about the state of the doughnut in the City of Amsterdam. How are we doing? What are we doing? Where are we moving forwards? Where have we not made progress? How are we doing this? And what more must we do? So they're using it as a tool to hold themselves accountable. At Doughnut Economics Action Lab we are engaging, listening, watching and learning and trying to figure out exactly how to allow an idea to spread at the speed and scale that this decade and these times require without it getting totally co-opted and therefore degraded and therefore devalued for everybody in the process. And it is hard and it's fascinating as well. Yeah, no joke. So it's funny because in the doughnut you have different facets. So you have the planetary boundaries up above and you can choose which ones you want for the social foundation. So they were very linked, if I understand with the SDGs as well. So in a way the doughnut as well is a monitoring system as such, right? By its birth, by its representation, it's a monitoring system. It's an indicator system. So that is already fantastic because we know are you within or out of the doughnut, right? So that is already fantastic. And then I think your colleague Andrew and Dan O'Neill and Julia also did this for all the countries in the world and they saw that no country is actually within the doughnut, if I remember well. And I think the closest one was Vietnam or Costa Rica, I don't remember. So I'm wondering and I read the book and at the end I was okay, this is a vision, this is a monitoring tool, but what are the actions? How do we get inside of it? So there are the seven ways of course, but give me a simple action or and then I thought, okay, that's why they did the deal, the doughnut economics action lab. It's called action lab. So I thought, okay, that's right. So I said, okay, that's the logical continuation of the book, right? We have an idea, we have an action lab and the actions are proposed by people and we share the experience. But can you foresee, for instance, by working with a territory with a business or whomever to develop like a doughnut action plan? How would that would look like? Or how would you go about this? Because it's not just putting all of these one next to the other, it's the complex interlinkages, like you reduce your unemployment, but it might degrade the water threshold or I don't know what, you know, it's so complex. How do you navigate through this crazy complexity? So of course, no one knows. And then often when I share the doughnut, I say, hey, by the way, this isn't an answer. It doesn't tell you the answers. There's no equation. There's no magic solution that pops out of the end. It's intended as a holistic thinking space that enables you to see everything that you need to be taken into account at the same time. And it's complex. And it might seem overwhelming. But you know what, these issues don't go away if we just ignore them. They're still there. They're just bubbling away in the background. So yeah, so the doughnut could be a monitoring tool itself. If a city set or a city or a place sets the what are the levels on the social foundation? Where do we need to be on the planetary boundaries? And year on year on year, are we coming closer or not? But and rather than jumping from that to okay, what are the policies? To me, it's crucial to focus on the dynamics. What are the big principles that we want to put in front? And I wrote doughnut economics as a set of ways to think and principles very intentionally because I'm writing this in 2015. I'm hoping it's relevant all over the world. So a policy that might make sense in New York is not the same as a policy that makes sense in New Delhi. So I'm not going to write a set of policies. And also I want this to be relevant over time. And the world and technologies and regulations and events will change. So I wanted to keep it at the level of principles. So two of the big principles that I just named, right? One, we've inherited linear degenerative economies. We take our materials. Here's your metabolism. We take our materials, put them into the pipe of production, make things we want, use it for a while, often only once, a plastic cup, and then we throw it away. And that's the linear degenerative economy that we've inherited. Thank you very much, great grandparents for inventing it. It made great wealth for many people, but now the earth is too small and the economy is too big and we realize this is running down the life support systems of planet earth. So we need to turn this from a linear degenerative economy to a circular, cyclical, regenerative one, where we use earth resources far more carefully, more collectively, more creatively, and more slowly. And we can call that a circular economy or a regenerative one. And I'm not, I don't want to get caught up in terminology and I know some of these different schools of thought can get very caught up in it. I think we can lose people that way, you know, we can lose the wider public. It's just too technical. So look, a little piece of house, but we need to use things again and again, waste from one process becomes food for the next a million ways in which we can invent that. But we need metrics to know how would we know if our economy was becoming more circular or not. And actually the city of Amsterdam, having put the doughnut at the heart of their circularity strategy, are now creating new metrics so that we measure this stuff. Instead of obsessively measuring GDP all the time, we measure this. Are we becoming more circular? But there's a second dynamic that really matters. Favorite toy coming here. We inherited economies that are divisive by design, that channel and capture opportunity and value in the hands of a few and we call it the rise of the 1%. Globally, the number of billionaires has doubled over the last decade from $1 billion to $2 billion. We know in many nations through inheritance, through regulations, through law and privilege, opportunity and value are concentrated in the hands of a few. And there's no way humanity can get into the doughnut if we have economies like this. We need to transform them so that these become distributive economies, so that value and opportunity is shared far more equitably with everybody who creates it. And that turns out to be everybody. So from degenerative to regenerative, from divisive to distributive, what about a project that says let's create the metrics to measure that? How would we know if our economy was becoming more regenerative? How would we know if our economy was becoming more distributive? Fantastic 21st century project of the new metrics that we need. And yes, we set up Donut Econox Action Lab to say let's find out where this action is happening and how it's being put into practice. So I'll give you one example, one of my favorite clear action that I think from a government. The Netherlands has said we're going to be 100% circular by 2050, 50% circular by 2030. I think that's real leadership by nation. And by the way, why has not every single European Union country done this? I mean, how can that and all the rich countries in the world, the North America and Canada and Australia and New Zealand, how can these nations, which are richer than nations have ever been before? How can we not commit to becoming circular economies? Why has this been lagging behind the carbon commitments? It should be illegal to have not already committed that you, of course, your economy must become circular. So Amsterdam has totally taken on this legislation, taken on this regulation, and they're saying from 2023, all built environment tenders must be circular. And from 2022 next year, 10% of city procurement will be circular. What I really like about this is it's got long vision, decadal ambition, but then next year opportunity. If you are a pioneer in the circular economy, we're creating a market for you right now. It also tells all businesses, you are welcome to do business in Amsterdam. But if you want to stick around, you've got to get circular. Otherwise you're going to have to leave. And here's the powerful thing. I think boundaries unleash our creativity. Now you could talk to any architect, any designer, and they'll tell you that is definitely true. Think of a skateboard. It's boundaries, it's walls and ledges and edges that give them something to do. It's the tram lines that turn tennis into the game of tennis from game of just whacking a ball around. It's football. And every boundaries are what enable us to get created inside. So when a government says, we're going to be 100% circular by 2050, we're going to be 50% circular by 2030, and we want built circularity in the built environment in two years time. That unleashes the creativity of architects who may at first think, oh, more regulations, but hang on, once you get over this, and I know architects in Amsterdam, more regulations, when they get on top of it, they're like, oh, we're now at the front end of circular building design. We now got skills and practice and experience that are going to be wanted all over Europe and all over the world. So this is actually, this has pushed us to the front edge. But also what I've noticed is students leaving university, they've studied circularity, circular materials, circular design, and they leave university and they say, you mean I actually get to do this? It wasn't just a nice fun thing we did in our textbooks and I have to put that away and get back to business as usual. I actually get to do this in my city. So I experienced a lot of energy and creativity in that city where the boundaries are clear, and I think it's missing in other places that haven't put those boundaries in. Do you think that too? You must be seeing this so much from your work as well. What do you think? The boundaries, what boundaries have you seen that unleash creativity? No, you're right. I think it's absolutely as well inspiring for people, for researchers, to see these targets. Of course, we in academia sometimes also get a bit cynical because there are promises, but they're not upheld and we're a bit, okay, is this the new craze? They're going to say they're going to be X amount circular, but how they're going to possibly do it? A city is an open system by design. A city is we made it over the, I don't know how many thousand years, so that it's, well, things accumulate somewhere else, and that enables other people to free up their time, to become an artist, to become a citizen, et cetera, et cetera. So by design, cities are open, which is I guess a fact, but how do you make it, how do you close a thing that is by definition open? So, okay, let's get over that. But then it's, okay, that is good. But how do we do things? So I helped the, I worked a lot with the region of Brussels. We held a chair on circular economy and urban metabolism. So during their four years of circular economy plan, we were a bit sparring partner to think things through. That's a difficult tongue to say. And the idea was, okay, but you are now funding so many different actions, innovative actions. How do we know that they're circular? And, you know, is there a way to define, okay, I put that million euros, I got more circular. They didn't have this, this measurement. And so that's kind of, that was a bit frustrating thing for many people to know at the end, okay, what have we managed in four years? Did this, I think wonderful activities happen over these four years. I think a lot of people made links. So it was a systemic opportunity to collaborate. And a lot of people didn't think that was possible at the beginning and are now motivated to continue. But then it's, okay, but what do we do the next four years? And how much do we need to do more? So we need, I think, quantities help us as well to know what are the efforts to be made? Because if we say 50% circular, but what are we today? Are we one, two, five? So I think these are the things that, of course, that's my job. So this is what gets me excited to get these numbers and to then help to say, okay, that fits into that number. Or that doesn't, you know, making a green roof is fantastic. But does it make a city more circular or not? What's the definition that we're giving it? And all of that. So yeah, I think that's, that does not answer your question. But for me, circularity is a part of something bigger, which is regenerative. So I would say, for example, a green roof is absolutely part of regenerative city. But it might not be part of the circular use of materials. But let me, let me pull back a moment. And that's interesting you worked with Brussels, because also it was the Secretary of State of Economic Transition in Brussels, Barbara Detracht, she contacted us and said, I want to bring the doughnut to my city. And we said, fabulous, we're not consultants. It wouldn't be right anyway for us to come to your city. We're not from your city. Find an organization locally that is embedded in part of the civic society. She did an organization called Confluence. And they over the past year have actually produced the Brussels doughnut. And they published it quite recently on a website, brussels.donut, really wonderful reports of them exploring what would it mean to do the doughnut in Brussels at the regional level, at the level of a neighborhood, at the level of buildings, the level of objects, really wonderful exploration about work. Where was that going to go? Oh, I know. Yes. So the question that we invite any city to ask, and since we're talking Brussels, I'll say Brussels. Here's the question. If any city says, well, we want to do the doughnut, what would it mean to do the doughnut here? Here's what would it mean? We invite you to ask yourself this very ambitious 21st century question. How could your city be a home to thriving people in an ecologically thriving place while respecting the wellbeing of all people and the health of the whole planet? Now, that's a big question. And it's got four parts. The first part is what would it mean for all the people of this place to thrive? So who are all the people of Brussels in their full diversity of the people who've lived there for generations, people who've arrived recently, different cultural histories, their values. What does it mean to people there to thrive? It's going to be different in Brussels to Barcelona to Bombay, right? It's going to change. Secondly, what it means for your city to thrive ecologically within its natural habitat. And here we draw on the work of the biomimic who think of Janine Benius. If Janine was to come to Brussels, she'd say, right, take me to the wildland next door. Now, I don't know where that is, but I bet there's some wildland. Okay, in the south. So let's go to the wildland next door and let's literally take a hectare of this land and ask ourselves, what is nature's generosity here? So how much is nature sequestering carbon on this land? How much is nature housing biodiversity and cooling the air and cleansing the air and storing water after a storm and building soil? And that is nature's generosity here in this place, on this land, in this part of the world where your city is based. Now, what if your city aimed to match or exceed the generosity of that wildland next door? How could the city go from releasing carbon to actually storing carbon like the trees do? How could the city store groundwater under the under the pavements after a storm? How could the city house biodiversity and cool the air so that it becomes functionally indistinct from the wildland next door? I love that because it's wildly but utterly naturally ambitious. So these are local aspirations to be thriving people in a thriving place. And in many of the indexes that are created of the best cities in the world where you could live, it's cities that have that they have great, you know, they have a great housing, great latte coffee bars and great Wi-Fi and a great culture and there's mountains and trees and the air is clean and we could swim in the rivers. So that's the kind of local aspiration. What these often fail to take account of is what you were talking about, the open system nature of this city's global responsibility because every city is embedded in intense networks with the whole planet and people worldwide. So we say the other half of this city portraits is to say how can your city respect the health of the whole planet? So think of the supply chains that bring clothing and food and electronics and construction materials and consumer goods to your city every day and that stream of waste going out. And that's where we must come back within planetary boundaries. That's the consumption footprint is the home of your work, which is so valuable for helping make this visible in numbers and concepts. How can we come back within planetary boundaries? And of course, almost every city in the global north is living way over planetary boundaries. So this is a major challenge and cities never done this before. They've never cut their consumption footprints. They've never cut their carbon footprints. They've never reduced the fertilizer use that goes worldwide into the food that they eat in their restaurants. And then lastly, we say, while we've got you, think again of those global supply chains of all the, you know, think of the people who stitched and sewed your clothes, who picked and packed the food, who assembled your mobile phone in your laptop, who dug and transported all those construction materials. And are those people's rights respected because they are connected to your city? Now, the last thing I'll say here is that when we produced the city portrait for Amsterdam, this was included this, this, this global social lens, and it included quotes from, so we use global labor supply chain research of products that we know are on sale in your city, whether they're computer products or clothing or food, and academics have done amazing work over the years tracing the supply chains of particular brands all over the world. And we can see the conditions of workers. So it's on sale in your city. Here are some of the workers who made those products. This is what life is like for them. And so it includes quotes from female cobalt miner in the Democratic Republic of Congo saying, I have aches and pains all over my body or child labor working for one or two dollars a day mining cobalt or a Bangladeshi garment worker producing brands that we know are on sale in the city of Amsterdam. When we first produced this, our colleagues in the city of Amsterdam said, no, no, no, no, no, no. This doesn't feel right. This isn't us. You can't put this in our portrait. And we had a really fascinating conversation with them saying, listen, you're facing up to your ecological portrait, which is shocking to look at. This is the social story that goes with it. It's not yours alone. This is true in every city. It doesn't go away if we hide it. Of course, this is part of your city's story. And to my huge respect for them, the city policymakers and the people who now talk about Amsterdam city portrait have absolutely turned around. You will hear the deputy mayor of Amsterdam, medical van Dornink telling you, oh, by the way, our city imports cocoa into the port of Amsterdam from across the world from West Africa, where we know there are modern day slavery conditions on those cocoa farms. This is connected to us. We now recognize we are connected to this problem. And as we are making our port more circular, we must also think about how we tackle that, too. So she's embraced it. And once you start facing it, you can start to transform it. I mean, after all, Amsterdam is home to Fairphone, which is aiming to make phones totally different. Choney's Chocoloni committed to slave free chocolate. The clean clothes campaign campaign for workers right to worldwide. So it's a city that's already in action about this. So I'm telling you this long story to say that bringing the doughnut to the city is a complex set of questions. And we create a canvas that we invite people to look at their city through these four lenses. Some people might find it overwhelming. Actually, my experience to date is that the people who we've had in a room or online say, no, this is empowering because we already know these things matter. We already know that they're interconnected and this helps us to visualize them and recognize them and then start to identify, as you said, more employment, more carbon emissions in Amsterdam. We want more housing. How do we do that without creating climate change? We need to move to another solution. We need more circularity. We need to be more social housing. We need to build it differently and we need to own it differently. So it's these boundaries that people then recognize are triggering innovation. Yeah. And I feel people feel more complete as well that we don't put the inconvenient truth under the carpet and we'll just take a bucket of green paint and then we'll paint our city green and everything is going to be nice. But that puts us researchers on a very difficult path to figure out the consumption-based approach for cities. This is like our nightmare because of the lack of consistent data and all of this. But on the other side, you put politicians on the hot seat like, look, look, your responsibility just grew by 90% right now. You thought that you were responsible to this amount of people, now you're responsible to that amount of people and it's up to you to figure this out. And yeah. And I want to ask you a question because this consumption-based accounting is so important. I can tell you, so Andrew Fanning and Dan O'Neill and Julius Steinberger, Will Lamb, they did these national donuts. In fact, that's how I first met them. They've done these amazing downscaling donuts for 150 countries and they're profound because some of the countries that, so I used to work at the United Nations Development Programme on the Human Development Report, right? It was my job around the year 2000 on the day that the HDI came out to go on the road show, radio show of the country that had come at the top and it was like Norway, Australia, Canada. And I had to go on their talk show radio to, hey, the best country in the world to live in. And I was so frustrated by this because the Human Development Index reflects health, education and average income. And these are some of the most environmentally polluting countries in the world, but it wasn't captured there. So I was saying, yes, congratulations. And we needed the data to show that actually there's an environmental degradation story behind that high achievement. Now, the downscale national donut does it and it does it visually. Again, coming back to the power of pictures. I tell you, I now work very closely with Andrew Fanning. He's part of the team at Donut Economics Action. I was so thrilled to have him as part of our team because his work is invaluable. I did a presentation for Norway recently. So I take the Norwegian National Donut, which looks very good on the social foundation, but lots of red overshoot. And I show this to Norwegian government officials and you can literally see that that's us. I mean, we're Norway. Yeah, exactly. No, we're Canada or we're Australia. That's us. And there's the shock. Now, it's only possible because of this consumption based data. So first of all, thank you to you and all the researchers who make this data, which I know is a incredibly fiddly hours painstaking work. But in the end, it literally makes people's jaws drop. It has a huge impact. And so often after a speech, a policymaker will say, when you showed that picture of our country with that that red overshoot, I mean, you can tell someone's really literally been physically changed inside their sense and therefore their sense of global responsibility as well. So I want to know what you see as this emerging future of the consumption data, because of course, at the moment, it's we don't have enough of it. Now we're aware of it. We want to downscale the city. We can't. So I want you to do I want you to tell me that we're going to get more. I want you to tell me that this is going to only get better. But but honestly, I want to hear from you. Where do you see this work going? And what do you think is most important to bring forward in the consumption based data in terms of actually having impact in policy? Wow. Well, thanks. We're flipping the interview round now. It's a conversation. It's a conversation. It is. So so just to clear things out for the people listening, consumption based is looking at everything that's happening from the mining until the consumption until the waste of one product. And then you have to add it for all of the products of your city. And then that's what we call the consumption based. And then you have what we call the territorial based. That's looking at the meters of your house of all of the houses around you. So you get one direct quantity and one consumption based quantity for Brussels, just as a reference, the consumption based is three to four times higher than the territorial one for energy materials for water is 42 times more. So and that's for agriculture. So it means that in Brussels becoming vegetarian or vegan is much more important than taking showers instead of baths. Right. So that's you can do both. Of course. Of course. I'm telling about priorities. I'm joking. I'm joking. So why and how is this possible? Brussels is a region at the same time. And luckily in Belgium, we have what we call input output tables that are regionalized and we have one for Brussels. So that's like the best case scenario. You have a city and you have it's it's stable. It's input output able to do it. Now there is almost no other cities in the world that have an input output table, except in Australia and things like that, where so some of the colleagues of Julia and you mentioned him in the book, Tommy Wiedemann and his team in Sydney. So they've been doing this for 15 years, 20 years now. And they've collaborated with the statistical offices there. So they downscaled this to neighborhoods. So they have individual input output tables for neighborhoods. And I think this is where it is fantastic because you can see the one neighborhood and compare them and all of that. And that's that's was only possible because they had this very long term collaboration with the statistical office. And then they infiltrated it somehow, you know, I mean, you get to have your colleagues there and they work with you and all of this. So I think this is more or less the future is to understand that we're nowhere near the challenge to to measure this kind of stuff. And then have our students. So as you said, the economic student, the economist of the 21st century or the environmental people of the 21st century need to have this in their tool belt, they need to know how to do consumption base, they need to know how to measure stuff. But this is going to take at least five to 10 years time before we get there, I think, because these input output tables are generally produced every five years, more or less. So we always have a delay as well. We only know like five years later what happened with the policy right now. So I hope that this is where we're going to get we're going to get modest about what we know and what we don't know. And then say, okay, don't don't. Well, we're all data poor in some case, right? There is always, we're never going to have the data that we want. So what can we do with it? What does it say? Let's interpret it. And what are the data gaps in order to I mean, what should we do in the next five years? So so data and information should be part of political plans to know about it to know about the stories, as you mentioned the social stories, because this is even less known, right? We know about the translating economic flows into environmental flows, but the social stories, this is like a black story, a black box, we know nothing about it. And it could absolutely be known. I mean, if companies wanted us to know, oh, you just put a little QR code on every shirt. You know, I could scan scan my shirt and up on my screen would pop a live webcam for the factory where it was made easy. If they wanted me to know easy. Congrats, you just enslaved so many people. It's not like it's impossible to do. It's it's who owns that information and who controls it. But I think it's going to be so important, this consumption based data, because just as in the climate change negotiations, it's still very much based on territorial emissions. And the idea that we should take responsibility for consumption. Well, some countries will still say, but that that that goes beyond our ability, our limits. But as you see in climate change, the more that it's possible to do attribution of extreme weather events and connect that to excessive carbon emissions, there are law cases coming right now. Once the information comes, the legal case comes. And I think with consumption based emissions and consumption based data, once the information comes, I'm not so focusing on the legal case is coming, but rather that the moral responsibility and the awareness that this is our hours to act upon and that we can affect it and that we can make a difference. And we'll see that change in the data. That's that's going to be more and more important. So I'm just really excited about, you say, five, 10 years, you know, the dinosaurs are saying blink of an eye. But of course, this is this is an important decade and we need it fast. And I really hope that we'll look back in a decade's time and we'll look back at the national donuts that Andrew and his team made. And they'll they'll look, I hope in a decade's time, they're looking credibly simplistic and almost crude. I really hope they do, because then we will have moved on, but we would never get there if we didn't start here. So I get frustrated when people criticize data for being incomplete or in out of this, like, do you want anything or not? I feel like the archaeologists brushing away the dust and gradually gradually getting a clearer picture as the data gradually improves. And you need to, you know, academics need to recognize it's shortfall and recognize it, inherit flaws and uncertainties, and still use it because it's the best information we currently have. Yeah, and we cannot wait 10 years to get the better data before we act, right? I mean, that's, but it's funny how economic policies, they didn't care about the data, right? They had whatever they wanted. And you, you so I had an economic crash course by by learning by reading this book, I learned so many biases that were by famous 20th century and before economists that all said, well, it's, you know, if we grow a bit more, things are gonna get better, be it Kuznet or beat other people. So yeah, it's, we can say that we had data before and we acted upon, right? We have some heuristic knowledge. We know that consuming less is better, right? We know that cities are open. And so probably they consume two, three, four, 10 times more outside. So even if it's three or five, you can still reduce it, right? I mean, there's no, we shouldn't wait until we know if it's three or five, we should just start reducing and we'll see where that gets. Exactly. Exactly. That's the direction we need to move in. So I'm excited about this kind of data being put together with this kind of picture. Yes. And enabling cities and there are the kind of policymakers out there who we need. You said, yeah, I want to use this as my new city dashboard, as my new national dashboard. Why not? Why not in five years time? Governments around the world standing up against this dashboard and saying, here is what we have achieved over the last year. Here is how we're making progress on eliminating these deprivations for people. We certainly have the data for that already. Here's the progress we're making on coming back within planetary boundaries. This is the new metrics to which we hold ourselves accountable. We're not going to stand here and just say it drives growth, growth, growth. We're going to say we are bringing ourselves into thriving balance. And that will be the metrics of the 21st century and metrics make visible a paradigm and a paradigm changes the future. So I want to ask you another question, which is about your penultimate chapter, the one on be agnostic about growth. You finish it about, so you had this whole, how is it going right now, growth? And then are we going to land or are we going to continue to grow? And then at the very end, you say, welcome to the arrivals lounge. And you say that actually the airplane was perhaps not the best metaphor to describe GDP's future journey. And then I was like, wait, what? So you said that Rosto should be introduced to 21st century water sports. And I reckon he would set his heart on kitesurfing as far better metaphor for the future of GDP. And then I was hooked. I was like, so why kitesurf? Tell me you kitesurf. I really wish I could tell you why kitesurf. That would be very cool, wouldn't it? Oh, yeah. I'm the European kitesurfing champion. No, I've never kitesurfed, but I've watched kitesurfing. And so because the airplane is a really sort of binary idea, it goes up and then it comes down. And that's just too simplistic. We live in complex systems just like our bodies that are constantly needing homeostasis, constantly adapting and jiggling between balancing between the ceiling and the floor, right? And you want to stay between and you have to adapt and you're transforming and there might be a wave of transformation and you go over a bump of it. And the point isn't are we going up or down? The point is this is adjusting. This is adjusting. So the major dynamics that we want to create, the major things we should be measuring, are we going from degenerative to regenerative? And are we going from divisive to distributive? These are the big trends that I believe that the 21st century should be judging itself by. Now what's happening to GDP? GDP is the value of all goods and services sold in an economy in a year. That's what it is. It's a fraction of all the things we care about because many things that we care about and give us well-being aren't even priced, aren't even in the market. So you can't buy them or sell them. So it's just a slice of it. And of course it tells you something. It tells you about the level of monetized economic activity going on. But the big trends we want, like the horizon we're going towards is regenerative and distributive design. Now imagine we're on a kitesurf, right? So you're juggling with the waves that are rolling beneath you. Let's think of the waves as being the regenerative design we're moving towards. These waves of regeneration are happening and it's disruptive. And then there's the winds of change coming through with being more distributive. Think of that sale is opening up, right? Here's my kitesurf sale. Big sale, catch the wind. I don't have my kitesurf as a prop. I should have. Yeah, you should have. Are you kitesurfing? Yes, yes. That's why when I read that I was like, oh come on. Next time we meet, yeah. Okay, you teach me. Will you teach me? Yeah, no worries. So and then tell me I'm getting this all correct, right? So you're juggling the motion of the waves under your board. You're juggling the pull of the wind in your sale. And how do you do that? Because in the middle you've got a bar and it goes up and down and you pull on your bar up and down to manage the relationship between the wind and the waves. And when I saw that, I thought that's it. GDP. I'm not going to go up. It's always going to go up. You don't want that bar always going up or down. The point is it adapts. It becomes an adaptive variable. And you use it to adapt to use the wind and the waves to get to where you want to go to. So yeah, so does that work for somebody else who knows this? Okay. Exactly. You need your line's intention and your bar as the regulating factor. So there we go. Next time we meet, I hope it's going to be over a beach and give me a zoom handshake. I want that. Good. So I generally ask two small questions before the end, which is what's next? What do you what's what's in the you know, the the plans for 2021? And then can you swim? Yes, I can swim. Good. That's going to be helpful for the kite lessons. And then some books, articles, videos, films, something inspiring that you would like to share. Oh, what's in the pipeline for 2021? Well, it's sometimes funny. You didn't ask me this, but sometimes people say to me, and what's your next book going to be? And I say, well, I'm not going to write another book until this one's done. And this one ain't done yet. So I wrote a book as an act of advocacy. I didn't write a book because I wanted to write a book. It just seemed the most effective thing to do next. And now the most effective thing to do is to do donut economics action lab. And I'm just loving working with these amazing change makers who show up because we never knock on anyone's door. We've never once asked anybody to talk about the donut, use the donut recommend the don't never. Why? There's so many ideas out there. Use the ones that make sense to you. So all the people we work with are change makers who've got in touch with us from around the world and said, this is useful to me in my context. And I'm thrilled and motivated every single day by working with those folks. So we are going to be working more in cities and places, global north and south. We're going to start working more with businesses and opening that box, seeing how we can do this well. So I'm really excited about that work that lies ahead. In terms of books, I want to recommend. Oh, my goodness. There's too many. I don't know if they're around by me now. I'm going to check. Okay. The one book that I've read that just really profoundly moved me. And I know it's been moving many, many people is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It's an amazing book that really actually takes us back to where this conversation began about the Argentinian talking about Pachamama and the Englishman talking about Western rational science. And Robin Wall Kimmerer is from First Nations culture in the US, but taught as a scientific academic ecologist and she sits across Indigenous knowledge and Western science of ecology of the land. It's just a profoundly brilliant book about regeneration of people and land. So that was a really brilliant book. Yeah, that's the one I'm going to recommend today. Thanks so much. And thanks as well, everyone, for watching or listening until the end. Please share this with other people that will enjoy this. And Kate, we have a meeting settled for next time we meet on a beach. We really do. You're on. Okay, great to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Hey. Bye.