An introduction to industrial ecology - Paul Behrens

The main parameters that you'd be really concerned about, things like GDP and growth, things like climate damages, these are all exogenous to the model there, outside what's actually being modeled. There are no feedbacks in the model between climate change and growth, for example. So everything you can imagine that's sort of quite important to the future is external to those models. Hello and welcome to Economics for Rebels, the podcast of the European Society for Ecological Economics. Up until recently it was an act of rebellion to pursue economics as if nature mattered and the earth was finite. This rebellion must bring a major shift to economic thinking. Our podcast is dedicated to exploring the economics of just and sustainable transformations in conversations with scientists, experts, activists pushing for rapid and radical change for people and planet. Welcome to our podcast. I'm today's host, Supaswamy Asin and you're listening to the Economics for Rebels podcast. Ecological economics teaches that the human economy is a subset of the biosphere and that every single transaction occurring in the human economy implies some kind of physical work and energy transformation or the use and transformation of resources. Thinking about the world in this way has radical implications for lifestyles, policy, practice and the future of society. Our main discipline for tracking the flows of energy and matter through the economy is industrial ecology. I've been wanting to do a podcast on industrial ecology for a long time. It's yet another branch of ecological economics that transformed the way I see my day-to-day interactions with the world. So it's a huge pleasure to welcome Professor Paul Behrinz onto the show today. Paul is a leading industrial ecologist and his current role is as a British Academy Global Professor at the University of Oxford Martin School and a guest professor at Leiden University. He's author of the book The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science and named an International Champion in the Frontiers Planet Prize in 2023. Welcome Paul. Lovely to be here, Sofus. Thanks so much for coming. So do you mind describing what you do in one sentence? One sentence. I ask the question, how can we survive and then thrive on this planet? And of course that expands out to everything. And so there's lots of different areas that I'm interested in. More and more recently I've moved into the food system, which we can talk about a little bit later. Yeah, okay, perfect. So part of this episode is going to be about industrial ecology for beginners, for all listeners, before we move into some of my favourite insights from your research and the research of other industrial ecologists. So for starters, can you help us understand the terms industrial ecology, social economic metabolism and material flow analysis? Lovely, lovely lots of terminologies straight at the beginning here. So the, they're all fairly related and one they all sit within each other I think in in a way. So industrial ecology is this relationship between society, economics and nature. And it's kind of considering the economic systems and ecological systems are sort of similar. So if you think about what's happening right now, at the moment, with tariffs around the world. And we see all of these different reactions to this tariffs and trying to rebuild these supply webs, you know, these very complicated structures of supply chains that go through and produce them. This is a very complex ecological web of interactions. And so industrial ecology tries to sort of bring in this environmental societal perspective onto economics. And you know, there's lots of different concepts across economics, which you know, are sort of, you know, industrial ecology sort of base. So things like spaceship earth, limits to growth, these system dynamics concepts. These are all sort of related. And I think, you know, industrial ecology in general, if you think sort of about the methods as well, it's often trying to get at this point of how do these systems develop, how do these systems have these impacts on the environment. And so there you're thinking about things like input output analysis, life cycle assessment, you're thinking about material flow analysis, who said so material flow analysis is a subset of that. Then you say a question, which was on socio economic metabolism. That's sort of referring to this idea that if you are going to think things as an ecosystem here, you could think of it as one big organism where energy and materials are flowing through from the extraction, through into sort of the re sort of fashioning of these materials into products or into services that are then consumed by people. And then the wastes of that are then excreted from society. So it's all like a big super organism in a sense. We're extracting all these materials all the way through to the end of use. But I think, you know, where socio economic metabolism and industrial ecology is particularly interested there is the important part of this is not simply that if you want to make things better for the environment, you think make things more efficient. You look at everything. So you look at the materials that are coming, what they actually being used for. But also what are the services and the needs that they're sort of supplying to people at the very end. And other ways to think about doing that, that we reorganize the whole system. And what could you then sort of imagine for that system. So, you know, and I think, you know, the socio economic metabolism gives you a nice frame for looking at the world. So one of the things that you know, wrote about in the book was how much energy we use, which I don't think, you know, many people, I don't really consider day in day out. But if you to add up the energy that we use embedded in the production of the products that we use, the operation of the products, just throughout entire society, each of us in high income nations have about 150 energy servants following us around. So the metabolic output of 150 people like on our, you know, at our our Beck and call, you know. And so, you know, it gives a sort of perspective of what is it that the society is ingesting and what is it producing. And of course, you know, sometimes that's a bit depressing when you see the outcomes, which at the moment are, you know, things like mental health issues, obesity, you're looking at air pollution and cardiovascular diseases, you're looking at a huge issues with welfare and well-being, you know, across nations. And we could do be doing it so much better. So that's what makes, you know, industrial ecology and social, you know, economic metabolism so interesting. I've been talking a while, but I think, you know, another nice thing to sort of think about is this is very much into this idea of philosophy then as well. And, you know, Karl Marx came up with this, well, he was said to have came up with this idea called the metabolic rift, where there's this sort of detachment from nature, you know, this alienation from nature. And so it can really sort of dovetail really nicely and with a political perspective. And yeah, and I think, you know, finally, it forces you to think about things, especially material flow analysis, where we look at sort of how materials are produced and and and where they're consumed and what happens to them afterwards. It forces you to think in terms of stocks and flows. And that's really important just in general from sort of a physical perspective. And so it gives you this sort of physics, this really good foundation of what are the physical limits to the society that we have to the economies that we have. Okay, perfect. That was a really great introduction. Thank you. Okay, so can I get you to elaborate a little bit more on seeing the world through the lens of stocks and flows? How does that differ from the kind of norm in mainstream economics of tracking monetary flows? Yeah, so the interesting thing about following monetary flows is you can see value along the chain. But you can't see the actual, the sort of the physical amounts along the chain, all the way in which needs are met by people. And so if you were thinking about stocks and flows in an economic sense, you might think about capital and investment and then you might think about rents in the system. But if you're thinking about things in a physical sense, you're thinking about stocks in the sense that what for example are the building stocks that we need to supply hospital schools? What do we need to supply transport and mobility? And how do those stocks then get built up in society? And then how do you then sort of keep an eye on those stocks? And when they become outflows, when they're not used anymore, how can you reuse them? None of that is represented as yet in monetary values. And so you can really think about what are the foundations of the world in terms of us being able to thrive and are well-being? Rather than simply who is willing to pay most of this marginal amount that I can sell it at? Yeah, okay. So let's get on to the depressing bit first, get that nice and out of the way. So one of the implications that I've taken away from industrial and the aspects of material flow analysis and socioeconomic comparisons that I've been following is that basically in the 21st century things just don't add up anymore. So when you add up all of the carbon embodied and the operational carbon of our infrastructure and energy projections, these things are just not compatible with planetary sustainability. So yeah, we know a major focus in mainstream economics is on the rapid construction of new infrastructure as a driver of economic growth and economic prosperity. So what are the implications of industrial ecology for the future of material consumption? If we take industrial ecology at face value, what are the implications for how society needs to change in order to achieve planetary sustainability? Yeah, that's a great question. It's such a lot of different aspects there. So I think when you're talking about these capital investments and these infrastructure investments, that's one way we've seen, for example, China grow massively. It's a very capital intensive investment intensive process and of course, you know, going beyond limits even for its own economy. I mean, it's one of the reasons why we've seen ghost towns, for example, across China. The incentives that people are under in terms of this very investment driven process. So yeah, I think, you know, if we take a sort of systems perspective and an industrial ecology perspective, then there are sort of three main strands to how things will need to change. You know, you can think about on the production side, you can think about on the consumption side, and you can think about the number of people overall consuming as well. So on the consumption side, it is the people consuming the most, which are driving the most of damage. And so this comes back to this idea about, you know, fulfilling needs of people. And living, you know, well within limits. A colleague of mine, Julius Thineberger, looks at this sort of regularly. And we know we need to change many other ways. I mean, one of the things I like about industrial ecology is it sort of shades off into lots of other different studies and books. And there was one book that was written that how many people can this world support? And well, the answer is anywhere between maybe 150 million if we're all gatherers or 10, maybe 60 billion, I think it was in the book was the highest one. If we all consumed in a sort of specific sort of vegan, very low impact lifestyle way. Of course, that's before climate change. And then obviously the carrying capacity of the earth then goes down and climate change. And it's harder and harder for us to support that many people. So those estimates would have to come down. I think it would be really interesting study to do, possibly terrifying. So, yeah, so when we're looking forward about how being sustainable, it really is a mix of that consumption side, that production side on the technology. And one of the things I think we have to sort of always bear in mind is that population is not the big issue. It's consumption. If you look at the future emissions, they're mostly going to be driven by consumption rather than production. If we do so called decomposition analyses, you can see this. Also, populations around the world are decreasing quite rapidly. And so this is not really sort of the issue that was once thought of, you know, in this sort of 70s, 80s sort of period with the population, but these sorts of concerns. And I think, you know, the final thing that, you know, industrial ecology can really talk about is reducing the throughput. Okay, so reducing the energy and material through put of society. And doing that then within a circular way where you're trying to retain as much of the material in society as possible. I have some issues with circular economy as terminology, but you know, it gets at the right sort of idea that, you know, these are not waste that you throw somewhere else. They're still on the planet and they're still with us. Yeah, and perhaps we can get into some of the specific food system and energy system changes that we need to see. What's your problem with circular economy? So my issue with the circular economy is not necessarily with the concept as a whole, although, you know, we can't get 100% recovery of things. There are thermodynamic limits to this. And I think there's this idea that we can sort of do. I think at its core, one of the things that enables is increasing throughput. Because the circular economy doesn't necessarily in the way that most people use it say that you have to reduce the size of those cycles. Those cycles can continue to grow. And that's actually one of the reasons why it's been so politically helpful. Because it allows you to avoid or align very nicely this question of growth and this question of material and energy through put. And, you know, if you actually look at the uptake of circular economy, over time, you see it sort of just replacing concepts like sustainable development or green growth or any of these other things. And what you see sort of within the scientific world and the political world is you see a word come up. It's a word that's kind of non-threatening, but it sounds good and it can do really great things and it probably could. But it's leapt upon because it doesn't really confront any of the sort of really core foundational issues. And then it is sort of like that's where things go. So there was one paper I reviewed some time ago where they looked at the uptick in circular economy compared to sustainable development. Or was it green growth? No, I think it was green growth compared to sustainable development. And what they found was that as sustainable development declined in its usage, green growth increased in its usage. And of course that's one thing. That's like Google Ngrams or something. But what they did then is they had a look at the commission, European commission reports over time. And they sort of did a sort of just a quick sort of find, replace type thing. What they found was green growth was just replacing sustainable development in exactly the same concepts. And I think we're starting to see this in food systems personally. I think we see this with regenerative farming. I think that's sort of a little bit of replacement for the agro-cological stuff. So I think there's these, you know, the biodynamic and organic even before that. So there were these words which are good in principle, but allow for this sort of slight squeezing away for a squeezing through, sort of addressing some of these really difficult questions. Totally. In my world, biodiversity offsetting, right? So the idea of the mitigation hierarchy, stopping stuff, always stopping and compensating for stuff that damages the environment. But of course, the way that's now being operationalised is to upscale biodiversity offsetting markets. Now what is upscaling a biodiversity offset market means? Well, every unit of nature producer and offset market is met by an equal and opposite debit, a loss of nature somewhere else. So you intensifying offsets as your solution means you never address the underlying driver of biodiversity. You just can't rise. You're just compensating for it. It goes up and up and up. That means your damage to nature goes up exactly equipmentally, right? And it wouldn't be, and it wouldn't be just to be super clear here, it wouldn't necessarily, necessarily, might disagree with this, be a problem in a perfect information technocratic sense where everything is done really well. The problem is, and this comes back to this Karl Marx idea again, we live in a capitalistic society, you know, for better or for worse, not going to talk too much about that, but you know, that is going to drive huge amounts of interest and money in a certain way of putting the playing field for that. And that playing field is going to be tilted by huge amounts of vested interests and lobbying power and all the rest of it. And so that's where you concern is. So let me push a little, probably a little bit on that one then. Let's talk a little bit about capitalism. So one of the main ecological economic critiques of capitalism is the kind of heuristic that capitalism thrives, deeply incentivizes over consumption. Would you agree with that diagnosis? And then what do you think the applications are? Can you radically scale down resource consumption in a capitalist economy or does that require some kind of fundamental change? Or does it hinge on the definition of capitalism, which is always my question. Yeah, I think it really does. I mean, that's the difficulty of this, of course. And it really does hinge a little bit on that. And how far towards, you know, quote unquote, free markets you're going and you all know that a lot of markets are free, even they said that they're free. And there's always regulations. There's always frameworks in which markets work within. I think in general, the way in which we've built the world and the way in which we're locked into the economic systems in different countries unfortunately is predicated on that growth. I mean, so one of the things that I always think about with the growth, for example, this idea that we're sort of going to, we could reduce and throughputs. We could even go beyond GDP. I think you did really wonderful ideas, but my constant sort of thought there is where we're locked into an international system where the first country that says we're not doing GDP anymore gets hit by the bond markets because they're no longer growing and then the bond market say you can't borrow anymore. So there's no borrowing for any sort of the infrastructure luck keep. How do these sorts of things work at this very macro level? We're very locked in in this sense and scholars who work in capitalism could be far more eloquent about this than I could. Yeah, okay, that's great. We'll get back to some of these massive societal transformations later. But I want to interject one of my nerd questions for the ecological economics community at one of the most important things. methods questions. So, quite specialist one, I'd love you to talk us through this sort of gently guiding us through your answer. In your own work, you've been quite critical of integrated assessment modeling and have communicated a preference for things like environmentally extended input output modeling instead. So, can you explain to our listeners what my question means? Yeah, can you explain? Yeah, what the methods that are conventionally used in economics are for addressing some of these issues and what your proposal tonics are and why? Yeah, so unfortunately they are quite technical and the reason why they're important is because the outputs are incredibly influential in a political sense. And that's really where the responsibility comes into and sort of interrogate and analyse them. So, integrated assessment models are a broad class of models which attempt to investigate scenarios of the future. So, they look at climate change predominantly and then they look at how we might be able to meet certain targets, what kind of trajectories we might be on. There are different types of integrated assessment model. So, there are the simple integrated assessment models and the complex integrated assessment models. The complex ones you can often think of as technology specific. So, they attempt to sort of look into lots of different technologies and the simple ones are like a sort of, yeah, just to explain very simply like a balancing equation of like the economy will grow, grow, grow. It'll cost us some money to address climate change. So, presumably if I could take into account the climate damages and I could look at how much we could grow, I could find mathematically an optimum point at which the warming would be perfectly set so that we wouldn't lose any more but we'd still be able to grow. Now, the fundamental idea of the simple integrated assessment models that I just described are flawed in so many ways. It's hard to start knowing what to start but the most fundamental one that we can consider right now is the parameterisation of the impacts of climate change. And so, this comes back a little bit to this concept of the industrial ecology, the sort of like that is a different way of doing things in the economy. So, one of the things that William Nordhaus did, who's a Nobel Prize winner, he made a very famous model called DICE and it was very influential. He said, okay, well, we don't really know what these damages are. They're in the future. But what I will do is I'll have a look through the entire economy and I'll look what's exposed to climate change and what isn't. And so, he really, he sort of said, well, most of these things are in factories, most of these things, you know, in terms of the economic activity, agriculture is a problem, yeah. But that's only 3% of GDP. So, actually, that's not going to have much of an impact on our economic wellbeing because, you know, 3% of the GDP is not that much. Of course, not realizing the fact that like if we don't have food seems important. We stop, basically, as beings. So, he did that and then he said, well, also, how do we actually then estimate these damages? So, okay, these damages are going to be on a certain area of GDP, so certain areas. How are we going to look at that? So, then he got together in an expert solicitation sense, a bunch of economists and climate scientists and said, you know, what are these damages going to look like? And there's different ways of parameterizing these and these models. But almost all of them are very, very flawed or they've got, should we say, a bias towards, you know, adaptation towards this sort of the economist bias that things will continue to really get better. Okay, the downside of this, of course, is that the recommendations from these models were used, as we talked about earlier, politics and capitalism in the sense that the business interests are always going to be interested in anything that allows us to delay. And what the optimum warming was in Nordhousis models, at least back in the day, was about three degrees of warming. Now, three degrees of warming, sitting here now, in 2025, is hard to imagine how the society, the complex society could continue, essentially. This is what we are calling a significant collapse, which is a simplification. And it's hard to see how organized society could survive in three degrees. So, and, you know, these models miss an awful lot because what they actually don't take into account is this idea of an ecosystem for the economy. And what we know is that, you know, as firms innovate, as values change, as consumption changes, it opens up all these other landscapes and possibilities within that space. And so, for example, it cannot take into account, you know, the idea of massive reductions in solar and wind costs. It cannot take into account the idea of behavioral changes towards healthier foods. Notwithstanding the fact that like, it doesn't even, they can't take into account anything to do with any other aspect of welfare. So, if we do do all these other things anyway, which would be better for us, you know, that's completely oblivious in the model. And that's actually similar for the complex integrated assessments model. So, let's move on to those. They are a set of different models from different teams around the world. And these are often reported on in the IPCC in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. So, what they do is they take all of these different models and they run them with these pathways of the future that describe different, you know, different sort of outcomes that you can imagine. Unfortunately again, all of the main parameters that you'd be really concerned about, things like GDP and growth, things like climate damages, these are all exogenous to the model. They're outside what's actually being modeled. There are no feedbacks in the model between climate change and growth, for example, which is one thing that you can imagine. International markets, all businesses would be really, really fascinated about, like, well, not just fascinated, kind of rely on that. And there's no feedback between that. So, everything you can imagine that's sort of quite important to the future is external to those models. Now, that's one of several issues. So, for example, if you were to use it for food systems, we know that in food systems you have these massive shocks, these huge shocks where you have bread basket failures, where you have food embargoes. We saw this during the 2007-2008 food price crisis. Now, what happens when you drive up those food prices in those shocks? Well, you get societal instability, riots, you get political instability, in some cases, even collapse. We saw food prices drive to some extent, the collapse of Syria, for example. I think recently, because climate change has driven about a third, according to some estimates, of food price inflation, I would also posit that the strikes that we saw in the UK a few years back, that was driven by, in part, climate change. Now, these are shocks. These are non-equilibrium events. They push the whole system totally out of whack, and all the prices go all over the place. Now, of course, these models are based on equilibrium modeling. So, you can have some shocks, but you don't have the same price in elasticity and to be really complicated here, that you would in real life. So, there's a couple of really big issues. We can continue going on with these things. Well, maybe another couple. Shall I do another couple, or do you want to. Let's go alternative. Okay. Oh, alternatives. I think the alternatives of this would be to take the world as it is, take a better analysis of climate impacts, take a better analysis of how technology is actually developed, and human societies actually develop, and take a better analysis of policies. So, for example, in the integrated assessment models, they tend to have just a smooth carbon price. That is the policy that's in there. Now, we know that's not how things work. We work through lots of different policies, subsidies, standards, regulations. There's loads of different ones. So, in real world analysis, we don't have those carbon prices. They may come down at the very end of the road. Also, we don't know how all of these shocks propagate through lots of different systems. And so, we're in a sort of perverse situation here, where some of the projections that are scenarios that are used for the integrated assessment models, basically say we're getting more and more food and less and less malnutrition. In a world where we know that other work is showing that agriculture will move out of the safe climatic space in lots of areas of the world. So, a lot of the tropical regions, we will no longer be able to raise livestock or to grow crops. It will be up beyond their tolerance. And this is not captured at all. The ongoing sort of grinding food price inflation, not captured in the integrated assessment models. So, I think in terms of the alternatives, I would much rather do smaller, not kitchen sink models where we try to throw energy systems, food systems, all the different economic systems, all everything and once. I would much rather do if this then that kind of modeling. This is what the picture of the world looks like today in terms of where we're producing food, how it's processed, where it's going towards. This is what the future would look like if this modeling on agricultural outcomes looks like it, you know, around the world in terms of nutrient availability, in terms of the demographics in those regions. I would much rather take that sort of more grounded, sort of almost physical thermodynamic approach than this price-based approach, which has so many assumptions. It's difficult to see how useful it is. Yeah, perfect. Okay, that was a great summary. Thank you so much. So, I want to move on to your own work. When I trawled through what to cover in this interview, it did kind of blow my mind how why ranging your work is. Applying many of the methods from industrial ecology but across so many different aspects of society. It's really amazing. So, let's start with decarbonisation of infrastructure. So, once you start tracking material flows through, material and energy flows through the economy, it gives you some kind of really non-trivial answers that kind of pop out of nowhere when you engage with infrastructure systems on a day-to-day basis. It unveils lots of problems that are actually kind of hidden from view. So, for starters, I want to talk a little bit about problem shift or the shift in the consumption of materials when we decarbonise our energy systems. So, some of your work has investigated the difference in the material intensity of our fossil-based energy system and renewable-based energy systems. And I found some of your work really interesting in revealing there. So, some people, a lot of people in ecological economics really worried about problem shift. But what does your work say? Yeah, so, yeah, thanks for that. Yeah, thanks, I've just. So, the work that we did there was to look at the international energy agencies most optimistic scenario. So, this is materials for loads and loads of people. What we wanted to do was we wanted to compare the amount of mining for the current fossil fuel system and for this future system, assuming that we needed materials for everybody, basically, like a very different world than necessarily in my opinion that I'd want to see. And I'll talk about that in a minute. But giving us the hardest time of it, basically. And with colleagues, Renny Klein and others, we looked at how this mining activity would increase over time. And in short, what we found was from the very beginning, mining activity will drop dramatically, even compared to just coal alone. We mine so much coal that actually, during the peak of the energy transition, when we're extracting all of those materials, the largest single year where we're doing that, we would still be about 30% lower than we are today, and it would still be lower than coal today. And of course, the thing you got to think about there is, is that that's their materials in society. Coming back to this idea of stocks and flows again, so helpful, because we're extracting all that coal every year, and that's coming through and we're burning it up in a flow, and it's basically just going up into the atmosphere and causing all these problems. With the energy transition, we have these stocks of value in our society. It becomes the infrastructure, it becomes the energy in our society is represented by physical things, not by stuff that we're just burning and blowing up into the air. So it's really quite exciting that. Now, I don't think that that's necessarily the future I want to see coming back to that, because I think we can do much better still. I don't think we all need electric cars, and I think electric bikes will go along a lot of the way. I think public transport is a really good idea for numerous other issues, and that will obviously reduce the infrastructure around that system. Even to the extent, even if we could look at heat pumps, now heat pumps as well, we could have district heating, we could have heat networks. This is another nice thing about industrial ecology. If you're doing your material flow analysis, you can look substance, you can also look at heat and how that's basically another thermodynamic way of thinking about things. We can be using heat much, much better. We could be taking heat from data centers in one area of a city, pumping it through to residents in another area of the city, or we could have large scale heat pumps that heat entire city blocks, rather than having lots of. Each of these would reduce the amount of materials that we need. It's thinking about that systemic, that consumption side, that whole picture, things like insulation, then you reduce the material required massively, because you don't need to oversized your heat pumps. They're going from a 7kW heat pump, you could go much lower than a 7kW heat pump for a medium sized house. All of these opportunities are there in reducing the size of the system. Brilliant. Okay, so taking away from that work, transition to renewables, massive decarbonisation, but we can do way more massive decarbonisation through all societal transformations that make our systems of provisioning more efficient. Yeah, and we need to do that now. Yeah, I mean, it's too late. Maybe if we started back in the 1990s properly, and we went really healthily over, we might have seen a world where you could just about, you know, hope for technological things alone and carry on. I don't know, that's a very, you know, that's much of a counterfactual nowadays. But nowadays we have to do everything or everywhere all at once. Yep, yep. So, thank you, people at past. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really appreciate that. And just to re-emphasize how incredibly efficient that transition as well is, every bit of electrification we do reduces the energy requirements. The total energy requirements that we put in by, you know, three or four times often. So, we waste so much energy in terms of heat. Yeah. So, you know, a coal power station, even if it's burning at very high temperatures, might only be sort of 50, 55% efficient. We throw away the rest of the energy. If you look at electric vehicles, they're about 80% efficient compared to petrol vehicles, which are only 16% efficient. So, every step around the way, we actually make the system smaller. It's the same thing with food, and so dietary change. If we have this dietary change, we're eating lower on the trophic levels. And we are able to save so much land and energy and make the system smaller. Now, the reason why that's important, that's important generally anyway. But in a world where we're suffering from more and more climate damage, we need to make that system manage in that world, this harsher. And that goes for energy, that goes for food. And so, we're going to be losing about 30% of our agricultural land, due to it being out of safe climatic space by the end of the century, under high emission scenarios. Then we're going to have a save a huge amount of land. And then doing that is going to have to require dietary change and this behavioral change side of things again. So, yeah, everything, yeah, everywhere are all the ones. Yeah, I wanted to platform some of your food system work next. My eye on a specific result regarding EU agricultural subsidies. But before that, so, do you want to summarize what you think people should know, the key takeaways of your food system transformation work? Yeah, thanks. So, the key thing is that we have to undergo this massive food transformation. Three pillars, we've got dietary change, reduction in food waste, and we've got improvements in production. But if you look across those three, the biggest single opportunity and one that we all have is dietary change. And it is also one of the areas where individual change really does matter. There's this constant argument between individual change and systemic change, and how do we actually balance that? In food systems, it really matters your individual change, because you have a direct voting three times a day with what you're eating. And your incentivizing markets to respond to different ways if you're eating that food. And it really matters, not only for the environment, but also for your health, of course. And so, when we look at high-income countries, you could reduce your emissions from the agricultural system by about 60 to 75%, depending on how plant-based you go. I mean, it's massive amounts. And what I find really exciting about this, and this comes down to this sort of idea about how do you communicate some of the solutions of this, is the opportunities from that. In the UK alone, if we were to go to a mainly plant-based diet, so we were going to eat a burger every two weeks, that's sort of level of meat consumption, we'd save an area the size of Scotland. If you were to extrapolate that across high-income nations, you'd save an area the size of the EU. And if you were to return that to potential natural vegetation, or be wilding, or whatever sort of whatever you want to do with that land, but sort of bring it back to the vegetation, you'd be able to draw down about 12 years of global agricultural emissions on that land over the long term. Notwithstanding the cleaner air, the cleaner water, the access to nature, the lower antimicrobial resistance, the lowers inocies, bird flu, you know, COVID, improved biodiversity, resistance to storm searches, flooding. I mean, you know, it's almost a bit much, isn't it, just to keep listening these things out, you know. It's an amazing thing if you just think about what that means for wellbeing. Coming back to this idea of services and people's needs, and we know, like, saying that say in the UK, we've got one of the worst mental health outcomes in the rich nations. And we know that being close to nature, we know that having access to nature, we know that having clean air and water is important for wellbeing and happiness. And so, yeah, I get quite excited by food systems. I'm sorry. No, they also just feel so tangible. Because it's so close to, like, you know, I'm sorry, and coming back to your point about the current system, you know, it incentivises, you know, the worst outcomes often. So you mentioned something about subsidies. So yeah, yeah. So we look to how subsidies flow through the common agricultural policy in the EU. And what we showed there is that about 82% of the subsidies go towards the most damaging products. That's embodied in this product. And in that case, it's not because necessary. there are subsidies for meat and dairy, for example, although there are some, there are some consumption-based policy subsidies and some production ones. But it's because they use so much land, and it's land, which is heavily subsidized in the current cap process. And so we have to get away from this idea of subsidizing land and get this get towards some idea of subsidizing common poor resources. So the subsidy of a sort of, what's the word? Look at, you know, basically subsidizing things for our common good. So the interview's coming to a close. I wanted to pick up, you know, I could feel the energy, the excitement when we're talking about food system transformation. Because it feels so tangible, it feels doable. It's also not a large percentage of GDP. So it feels like maybe the lobby's blocking progress, or maybe like less severe. You know, it feels like something that we can actually achieve. But, you know, I got inspired by your excitement there. And alongside your academic work, you've done a lot of advocacy, a lot of, you're very politically engaged for an academic. Now, in your engagement with society, what have been the arguments that have played best? I think I can get hint of it from your energy there. What are the narratives that we can tell using industrial ecology and your other areas of expertise that can form the foundation of positive change, rather than just facing people with sort of overwhelming terror? Yeah, yeah. Well, so just a bit of overwhelming terror before all that. Yeah, I do want to do a comment on the comments on the, so the, you know, you said agriculture is three depends percent of GDP. It doesn't make much of GDP. What's interesting is agricultural lobbyists spend more than every other sector in the US, for example, so they're bigger than defense, they're bigger than pharmaceuticals. So we are, it's a big uphill battle on this. And what's really interesting about food is it intersects with a lot of values, it's intersects with a lot of social sort of behavior. It's very, very interesting. So on the communication, my attitude is that I think it's really important to be honest. I think that I get a sense, and you can see this in the literature as well. People have fed up with the sort of placatory sort of remarks about everything's going to be all right. There's a bubbling sense of real uncertainty and feelings of, you know, of doom for the future. But so I think we do owe it to ourselves and others to be honest, but not to be in this sort of a morph of doom where we just think, oh, well, that's that then. You know, we have to actually describe what it looks like. So when I talked about the agricultural niche, you have to actually describe what this looks like to, you know, infrastructure damage or to migration, you know, to the best of our knowledge. So we can't just be a morph of doom. Now that's that. Then I think, you know, it's important. And I think totally fine for others to hear how alarmed we are as people who are looking at this all the time. Unfortunately, we have to stare at it all the time. Lots of people don't. They stare at it maybe once a week and go, well, that seems too big. Put it over to the side. And I think there's this very human emotional response to somebody who's also really worried who's studying this in a really sort of open way describing what's happening. And in a meaningful way. So I think we should be bringing emotion into that to do. But then I don't think that that's enough. We can't leave it there. We've got to give the solutions. And we've also got to bring the emotion to that because so many of the things that we know we need to do will be so amazing in so many ways. And we know we needed to do it. I mean, sometimes I often call this sort of this period that, you know, the crux for society, ever side of humanity. Like, are we going to do it or are we not? You know, we had this idea of this, you know, the arc of history bends towards justice, you know, mountain, the king sort of thing. Unfortunately, climate change and environmental change puts a limit on how long we've got to make those changes to society to make it more equitable, to make it more a higher society with higher well-being. And so it's sort of make or break time for humanity in this sense. So I think we had to give those solutions. And when we do, when we do those solutions, then that's how you build hope if we engage in those solutions. So I often think as scientists and for listeners out there, I think we should be talking about the things that we're doing not in a blaming way, not in a, I mean, I know judgment. But the things that we're doing in our own lives, because although that's not a systemic change, that's an individual change, which takes everybody on a journey. And by doing that journey allows them to engage and talk about their own concerns and what they've done. And then also allows them to work together in communities, which less face it. That's where the big stuff will happen. We work together in communities for systemic change. That's how things happen. But, you know, people say, "Oh, individuals can't do anything. We've got to rely on the big systems to change." Well, how do you think systems change? You know, they change through individuals changing, through them interacting and putting pressure on the system. And then that has this feedback, where then the systems change and allow for different behaviors within society. So the system, for example, in the food system now, the system seems to be changing to an extent that places like Denmark have developed the plant-based action plan. And by doing that, what they're doing is investing across the whole supply chain, and then allowing for people to engage in those behaviors, which then forms a feedback. So I think, you know, explaining these sorts of dynamics to people is both important and exciting and gives a lot of hope. And I think, be accepting of ourselves as well, we're all on a journey as scientists, as individuals, as people in the world. One final thing I would say about Hope is, I think, you know, hope is a better future than we can imagine today. And that will always be changing. So there's no, although I said "make a break earlier", there's no point at which it's not worth trying and going out swinging. So, you know, hope is basically a better future than we can imagine today. A reasonable future, apart from to get there that you can imagine, because a utopia is not, that's not helpful. I mean, that's sort of disarming Hope again, and a way in which you can engage in that, and you can act within that. And that's how you build Hope, I think, for the future. And so I think, pay taking people on that journey, as quickly as you can. I realize that that's really, really tricky, is really, really important. And I think, you know, talking to people's interests, talking to their own life experiences, and how this would change the things that they do on a weekly basis, if you're in those individual conversations, how that might change the hobbies that they have. What they're able to do, the travel that they're able to make, the food that they're able to eat, and for the better and for worse. Yeah, we normally end with a final question, but actually, I think that was the most beautiful ending I could have imagined. So, I really, that was a really eloquent, beautiful description of Hope there. So, thank you so much to Paul Berens for being with us today, and thanks everyone for listening. Thanks so much, Sophie. Thank you for listening to the podcast series of the European Society for Ecological Economics. If you like the conversation, and your work is related to ecological economics in any discipline, consider becoming a member of our society to stay connected. If you are ready to discuss the topic, join our Facebook group called European Society for Ecological Economics. [BLANK_AUDIO]