A NEW APPROACH TO FUNDING NET ZERO
James Taplin is the original champion and project lead for Future Ready at Innovate UK.
In this interview James explains the origins of his passion for sustainability, how Future Ready represents a new way of tackling market failures, and the role of Innovation Leads as critical friends in supporting your local net zero transitions.
Where do you get your net zero inspirations from?
When I was about 7, I remember sitting on the floor of my narrow bedroom, next to the bunkbeds I shared with my younger brother, reading a Gerald Durrell book I’d been given in school that day with a sludgy-green cloth cover and a faded illustration of a meandering dark river on the front, and having my mind blown.
My thoughts travelled through exciting and exotic places, wisping, and wafting into corners of the world that I didn’t know existed before, undulating through wild places and times, and returning heady and fragrant with rich and unfamiliar opportunities. I decided there and then that I was going to work in sustainability (well, I actually decided I was going to be Gerald Durrell) and that has been my focus ever since.
I have worked on it from all sorts of angles (business, academia, third sector, and public sector), and all sorts of places, including a seven-year stint monitoring vegetation and local climate change in a remote Tanzanian forest as part of a large hydropower development which was physically exhausting but gave lots of moments for quiet reflection (eating boiled eggs and dry sweet bread for lunch by the side of one of the little drinking streams, watching hornbills swoop across the gorge, hearing black and while colobus shouting at us from the high treetops overhead, or feeling the gentle pincer grip of a tiny pygmy chameleon clinging to the top digit of my index finger).
The economic, social, and environmental needs and repercussions of that development were convoluted and demonstrated day-to-day the trade-offs and importance of having a broad view and a systemic approach.
My decades of work have brought me into contact with lots of amazing people, beautiful thinkers and creative doers who are driven by the knowledge that it is entirely possible to create better solutions that have the welfare of all as a basic principle, and which can be delivered without trashing the non-human parts of the world we live among, and which sustains us.
My decades of work have brought me into contact with lots of amazing people, beautiful thinkers and creative doers
Do you have any hidden net zero talents or hobbies?
It is not a net zero talent as such (although could maybe have more use if we fail to deliver net zero at the pace needed) but I am a bladesmith in my spare time. The physical tangibility of making something is sometimes a useful counterpoint to the generally intangible laptop-based day job and, when I eventually get good enough, the idea that I can make something once and make something well that is beautiful and useful, needs no other energy to keep doing its core essential job, and which outlasts me feels kind of net zero-ish.
James at the recent Future Ready cohort event in Bristol
What excites you most about the support being provided through Future Ready?
I’ve been with Innovate UK for about 9 years now. I joined to help set up the Urban Systems Team (although it was called Future Cities then) and to bring in cross-system thinking. At the time, Innovate UK operated in relatively narrow technological silos, and part of our team’s remit was to see where we could work with and across the other teams, and to work in the gaps to make them stronger and better together.
This systemic view is now common and core to the vast majority of what we do, but at the time it was still novel, and it wasn’t easy trying to explain what we were doing and how we could work with the technical teams – what it allowed us to do, however, was to have a good view of what was going on across the organisation.
Since then I’ve been involved in lots of other programmes in our own team, and in collaboration with others across Innovate UK and UKRI, and in all that time, and all those interactions, I don’t think we have had any programme before with the scale and scope of Future Ready. We have had large managed programmes supporting projects, but in terms of the number of places we are working with, and the intensity of the engagement, I think this is pretty unique.
The opportunity it gives us to be close to places and their issues at a frequent and granular level, to use those insights in real time to alter and adjust how we respond and best support the cohorts has never been done at this scale. And on top of that, to be building an active collaboration network of this size, and to be ensuring that all we learn is made openly available to everyone else to help support and speed their journeys is entirely new.
I guess what excites me most about all of this is proving that local delivery of net zero is socially, economically, and environmentally the most effective way to go.
I want cohort members to feel energised and full of possibility.
What would you like the Futurenoughts to experience and would you like them to feel at the start of this journey?
I want cohort members to feel energised and full of possibility. I want them to support one another in having a positive and not business-as-usual (which, let’s face it, is frequently flawed and unfit for purpose) mindset. If you are the average of the twenty people you spend most time with, then I want this cohort, working and spending time together, to feel that anything is possible – to be lifted up above the constant barrage of the day to day, and to see that all of those barriers that look insurmountable when you’re crushed down in among it, are actually only small bumps that can be coasted over, and that they can get much further into all sorts of fascinating places just a little further down the road.
Where would you like the Futurenoughts to be in six months time?
Shaking things up, but creatively and non-destructively. Learning lots. Having conversations and experiences that stretch and grow them, and which they can use to help stretch and grow their places. Asking loads of questions – about why some things are as they are, and how they could be better. Probably in a bit of a comfortable confusion as they work through the process of opening ideas and possibilities, but not yet quite knowing how to.