OnMarch 21, 1995, biologists hired by the U.S. National Park Service released 14 grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park. It was an attempt at addressing a problem that had steadily deteriorated the park’s ecosystem since the 1920s: the overpopulation of elks. The scientists predicted that by reintroducing an apex predator they could trigger a trophic cascade — a domino effect that causes the recovery of individual species in an ecosystem, one by one, based on each species’ rank in the food web.

In the months and years following the release, the biologists observed with suspense how their rewilding effort was affecting the park’s flora and fauna. What they discovered was astounding. In line with their predictions, the wolves started to prey on elk, reducing the local elk population. This allowed aspen and willow trees to recover, providing food and construction material for beavers. When those beavers multiplied and started to build dams, they created new habitat for fish. Plant life along river banks began to thrive, reducing soil erosion. The hunting patterns of wolves also meant that carrion became available throughout the year, a blessing for ravens and bears. In short, the experiment was a resounding success and became the most celebrated ecological intervention in history.

Restoring an ecosystem of the size and complexity of a national park could be enormously time consuming and costly. Instead, it was accomplished with a simple measure: the reintroduction of an animal sitting on top of the food chain. There are other examples of relatively simple actions that have generated outsize impacts:

• 30 years ago, the United Nations adopted the Montreal Protocol, a document of only 49 pages that saved the Earth’s ozone layer and avoided an estimated 250 million cases of skin cancer.
• In 2016, the two largest retailers in Switzerland started charging five cents for grocery bags made of plastic, causing the use of these bags — previously thought to be indispensable — to drop by a staggering 80%.
• When Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, gave his famous Tragedy of the Horizon speech in 2015, he sent shock waves through the financial industry and fundamentally changed how corporate executives thought about climate change.

Why could these small actions trigger such wide-ranging effects? Because they had leverage in driving systems change.

Leverage is powerful. Pull on the right lever and you will change the course of history. Yet leverage is also elusive — difficult to find and engage, particularly for such complex problems as global warming. In Search of Leverage is a new Medium publication that will explore a seemingly trivial but surprisingly difficult question: In our effort to curb climate change, what should we focus on?

Leverage amplifies a force. It multiplies the effort you put in to produce a higher output. As children, we experienced leverage on the playground when playing with shovels and seesaws. As adults, we benefit from leverage through the mortgage we borrow to buy a house, the device we use to open a can, the socially-connected friend who introduces us to interesting strangers, and the workout routine that not only makes us fitter but also allows us to sleep and concentrate better. Leverage is so commonplace that most of us don’t even notice when it’s present.

Leverage is about efficiency — engaging it means getting better results without increasing the effort. Utilizing leverage is therefore crucial for anybody pursuing a goal with limited resources. Political will, public attention spans, research agendas, social capital, and fiscal budgets — these resources are critical in our fight against climate change, and they are scarce. So we need to make our actions count.

The climate community often fails to engage leverage when analyzing issues or proposing measures. Some climate advocates love checklists of individual actions such as insulating homes, installing solar panels, and recycling waste, but they fail to recognize that individual behavior and lifestyle changes alone will not solve the collective action problem that is climate change. Others call for tighter fuel efficiency standards in vehicles, not realizing that better fuel economy makes driving cheaper and leads to even more driving — a phenomenon known as the rebound effect. Those advocating a carbon tax as the golden path to sustainability falsely believe that humans are rational creatures who make purchase decisions solely based on price signals. After studying the use of leverage in our effort to stem global warming, researchers at Leuphana University in Germany concluded:

Many sustainability interventions target highly tangible, but essentially weak, leverage points, using interventions that are easy but have limited potential for transformational change.

Appreciating leverage means questioning the mindsets and paradigms that form the bedrock of human civilization. It means paying attention to the mental models we use to make sense of the world and find meaning and belonging. It means questioning the goals, structures, and rules we set for our systems and how we design the flow of information and the distribution of power.

Leverage is the reason why I admire Elon Musk for making sustainability cool. It’s why I was excited when Pope Francis added his encyclical Laudato si’ to the reading list of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics around the world. It’s why, in 2015, I was hopeful that COP21 would produce a strong multilateral climate treaty— and why I was disappointed by the paltriness of the Paris Agreement.It’s also why I’m concerned that climate change is virtually absent from contemporary art.

Identifying leverage is hard. Engaging it is even harder. The first challenge lies in developing a conceptual understanding of the elements, relationships, and dynamics that characterize a system of interest and an intuitive feeling for how the system behaves over time. Most systems relevant to climate change are complex and adaptive. They change constantly in response to internal pressures and external influences, self-organizing based on a mysterious set of rules. They follow a cause-and-effect logic that reveals itself only in hindsight and after scrutiny of the relationships and feedback loops that define their internal dynamics. Economies, immune systems, brains, and biotopes are all complex adaptive systems, as are social constructs such as nation-states, families, and companies. Finding leverage points in a complex adaptive system requires careful study and thoughtful experimentation.

After identifying leverage points, the next challenge is to figure out how to act upon them. It’s easy to recognize behavior change, investment, and technological innovation as levers — as the IPCC’s 1.5 °C special report does — but it is difficult to find out exactly how to act upon them. How do we make the world adopt a diet that can feed 10 billion people without wrecking the planet? How do we triple global investment in renewable energy? How do we accelerate the electrification of transport when electric vehicle uptake remains insignificantly low? Understanding how to pull on levers in a way that triggers rapid and tangible systems change is the toughest challenge for anyone trying to stem climate change.

The quest for leverage will take us deep into the theory and practice of systems thinking. It will animate us to reflect on abstract concepts such as time, identity, and values. It will encourage us to review how we engage language, policy, and culture in service of climate action. It will force us to draw from a vast range of disciplines such as psychology, political science, economics, engineering, business, and arts. It will make us explore how we can use exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, virtual reality, and synthetic biology to understand and manipulate systems.

Expecting to stumble upon one magic solution that will solve all our problems — like those grey wolves in Yellowstone National Park — would be naive. But in our desperation to make tangible progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we have lost focus. Systems theory tells us that some actions are more powerful than others in driving change, so we know that leverage exists. We need to start looking for it again.