What on Earth is an Earthshot?
You’ve probably heard of a ‘Moonshot’, but how about an ‘Earthshot’? This year, Regen Melbourne is thrilled to (re)introduce our trio of wildly ambitious Earthshots – three interventions we believe will help us unlock systemic transformation across Greater Melbourne. Here, Nicole Barling-Luke explains why they’re imperative to our work.
Regen Melbourne’s work is anchored in place through three ‘Earthshots’ – Swimmable Birrarung, 15 Minute Cornucopias and 300,000 Streets. They are our ambition, research and collaborations in action.
Why don’t we just call them projects? Because they’re more than projects. We use the term Earthshot to illustrate the scale and radical ambition of the work. It’s a declaration of intent to tackle complex social and ecological challenges. An Earthshot exists beyond any one sector or any one solution. It requires ambition of possibility, coherence of a collective response and a change in the systemic conditions we operate in.
Like we said, more than just projects.
You can track the language back to ‘moonshot’ – a term adopted to describe the race to land humans on the moon in the 1960s. At the time, it was not known how to make such a seemingly outrageous mission possible (nor did the technology, funding, or sector organising exist to facilitate it). But new formations, markets and ways of working were accelerated by setting a singularly ambitious goal – and that “giant leap for mankind” was achieved. Systems thinkers, Alex Hannant and Ingrid Burkett, explain the moonshot framing in excellent detail here.
An Earthshot refocuses the scale and ambition of a ‘moonshot’ back on our planet, with the aim to accelerate new ways of operating and create conditions for our city systems to thrive in balance.
At Regen Melbourne, we draw on the rallying cry from Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy work, alongside the growing international practice base around missions – a particular favourite being the Vinnova Handbook by Dan Hill (who’s on our Research Council) and the The Good Shift by Ingrid Burkett (who’s on our Systems Advisory Circle).
Why do we need Earthshots?
In short: because the way we are doing things right now isn’t getting us where we need to go fast enough.
Greater Melbourne as a city is bursting its ecological boundaries, and we’re pushing the limits of what a planet can sustain through the current use of resources, land conversion and waste. And our consistent ranking as one of the most livable cities in the world hides the reality that this livability is by no means evenly distributed, we are not meeting the social foundations everyone should have to thrive. You can see this in the data of the City Portrait – our platform which tracks how well Melbourne is supporting people and planet to thrive.
We know that the current conditions straining our people and planetary health are cascading and interconnected. We also know that our current responses to these conditions are insufficient. We need new ways of seeing, thinking and doing. We need ambitious, impact-oriented ways of orchestrating systemic change for a city that still has a choice about the direction this transition could take.
Enter: Earthshots.
We need collectively-owned, long-term visions that set the intent for transformation at the scale we need it, rather than agendas that are, by nature, restricted by policy or market incentives. And we need these visions to come from a mix of organisations and individuals working across Greater Melbourne.
We need spaces where different types of resources and partnerships can come together to realise compounded benefit: multi-solvers. By doing one thing in an acupressure point of a system we can unlock disproportionate value and outcomes. A thriving food system doesn’t just mean we have more money at the end of a weekly food shop, a thriving food system means regenerated soil health, means a return of biodiversity, means increased health outcomes, means a more connected community.
We need a theory of transformation and intervention strategy. Earthshots set a new direction for what is possible, while creating coherence of multiple responses. Earthshots are not about consensus building, yet they do hold a logic of where and how to intervene in a system across a portfolio of projects. Projects which, perhaps, are already underway and need amplifying; or projects which are yet to be designed through an unusual partnership of actors.
So, why a swimmable river, 300,000 streets and 15-minute cornucopias?
Co-developed with our partner organisations, our portfolio covers the major cultural and asset layers of what makes a city like Greater Melbourne come to life: our waterways, streets and laneways, and food system. These layers contain the history, culture and deep connections of our place. And they’re also where we’re, unequally, experiencing the greatest risks posed by climate change, extractive economics, disenfranchisement and the many other interconnected challenges of our time.
These Earthshots were not born overnight. Unlike many other approaches to Earthshots (or mission-oriented innovation), the work we do here in Greater Melbourne is not top-down from existing institutions. The basis for these Earthshots comes from a collective mandate, set over 2019-2020, when over 500 individuals came together to set a new vision for Greater Melbourne. Since then, the pathways around waterways, streets and food have emerged.
After the framing of the Swimmable Birrarung landed, we always knew we would work across food systems and at the landscape level of street/hyper-local. However, it took between 9-12 months to finalise the orientation of the specific ‘Earthshot’ for each. This process involved deep engagement with various cross-sector actors to get the ambition level high enough, while making sure a broad network could see themselves in the pathways towards the goals.
Ultimately it is place – on riverbanks, the streets we live, work and play on and in the food we eat, buy and grow – that holds the messy middle of change. And it is here that sets the stage for how we are working together to bring new and better futures to life.
Earthshots architecture: more than just a vision
What makes up the guts of an Earthshot, and why do we need each of these parts?
These Earthshots are ambitious collective shared goals, operating across ‘wicked’ challenge spaces – action towards these goals depends on orchestrating a complex web of factors and actors. Our approach recognises that oftentimes scaffolding is required in order to create a centre of gravity that can help tilt a system towards new potential.
As Alex Hannant and Ingrid Burkett write: “Mission-led approaches provide us with an architecture to conceptualise and orchestrate movements for intentional, systemic and structural change.”
And so we consider the make-up of the Earthshots through the following architecture. This architecture holds together platforms for the energy, knowledge, expertise and resources of our collaboration partners to be channeled towards the goal. Most of this architecture sits “back stage” in our work, scaffolding our internal logic and direction but not necessarily foregrounding the work on the ground, which shows up through the projects.
What role does Regen Melbourne play?
The team of system-ninja-convenors – who come from deep embedded experience in the water sector, community organising and the food system – operate as the connective tissue between different parts of the system and economy, in order to create a strategic portfolio of interventions that shape the conditions for future projects. At times, they are convenors of people, of ideas, of possibilities, of resources and/or of knowledge.
Alongside the convenors, within Regen Melbourne we also have a team of system-ninja-action-researchers who work within the Systems Lab. Their role is to attend to the cross-cutting themes across the Earthshots, keeping an eye on the long-term conditions we need to unlock regeneratively-tilted potential. They move between diagnosing the landscape-level challenges on things like systemic investing and new urban governance, and diving deep into experiments within the Earthshots to surface new insights for how we can be more effective in our collective responses.
At any given time the team are moving between different postures, from:
Field building: Building trusted relationships across multi-stakeholder environments, convening and connecting others to reveal compelling alternatives.
Orchestrating: Collaborating with partners to a) learn about and navigate the complex web of factors and actors within our place; and b) create new formations to respond.
Catalysing: Driving projects, leveraging resources and partnerships for greater systemic impact and learning.
Taken together, these postures ensure we can approach our Eartshots from a strong foundation that has been built by many practitioners, experts, community groups, academics and stakeholders. Each posture provides us a position to return to if or when the work becomes challenging, with field building and relationships being the fundamental ingredient to all of our work.
Where to from here?
The work ahead is to continue operating as the connective tissue between different parts of the system and economy, in order to create a tangible portfolio of projects that shape the conditions for future action and real-world impact.
Together, these Earthshots add up to transformational change in our city. The impact of each is deeply connected to the City Portrait—progress towards each Earthshot will bring us closer to the safe and just space. Of course, this remains uncertain, messy and unpredictable work –yet the Earthshots provide the necessary structure and ambition for us to move forward. It is time now for much greater ambition, commensurate with the risks we face, locally and globally. And while these Earthshots require systemic collaboration, which is hard, it’s also incredibly joyful and, we believe, the only real way forwards.