GoZero is helping Kiwi households and communities to live well, save money, and build resilience together.
We provide practical tools and spaces to help Kiwis to enhance their wellbeing and collaboration, at a time when cost-of-living increases are making life more difficult.
We use sufficiency as the way to build wellbeing while reducing harmful consumption, environmental risk and economic hardship. Our approach is based on the evidence of what works, and what doesn't.
What Are We Responding To?
Heading Towards Insolvency
The increasing cost of essentials, including water, food, energy and insurance, is being driven by complex, connected crises. Conflicts around the world are increasing energy costs. Environmental breakdown threatens the life-support our economies and societies rely upon. The crises are symptoms of an underlying cause: an economic system that extracts, consumes and pollutes too much.
Current cost-of-living pressures are just the start. We are headed for what global risk experts have called planetary insolvency, with a 2°C warming by 2050 now highly likely.
What Is Going Wrong?
Why Responses Aren't Working
Current approaches aren't working, because they are based on flawed models, are focussed on symptoms rather than causes, overly rely on markets and technologies, and are individual rather than collective in nature.
The models used by governments and businesses are not accounting properly for systemic risks. Responses to economic symptoms are focussed on growth, promoting increasing extraction and consumption, which worsens risks. Markets can't solve problems they create by design. Responses to the environmental symptoms – such as individual carbon footprinting, business efficiency certification, green consumerism, and electrification – are also market-based and drive consumption. They ask people to act alone, in private, in a system that offers no coordination mechanism and no shared benefit.
The main barriers to change are structural, not individual. The main opportunities to deliver progress are collective. The failure of individualised approaches is not evidence of individual apathy, but of the wrong approach.
What Works?
Sufficiency First
We believe sufficiency is the best way to address cost-of-living pressures, by helping Kiwis build wellbeing and avoid unnecessary or harmful spending, at the individual and collective levels.
The IPCC's Sufficiency-Efficiency-Renewables (SER) framework also names sufficiency as the necessary first step to tackling climate change. Only sufficiency addresses overconsumption and the other ecological limits. Sufficiency is defined as “a set of policy measures and daily practices that avoid demand for energy, materials, land, and water while delivering human well-being for all within planetary boundaries.”
However, this is being applied backwards, with renewables and efficiency measures being deployed first, driven by market forces. Gains made are typically cancelled out by the rebound effect, as savings fuel further production and consumption. Efficiency and renewables without sufficiency first equals waste.
What Can Households Do?
The Sufficiency Savings Tool
Sufficiency isn't about austerity or going without, it's about embedding a simple question into our consumption decisions: Does this consumption contribute meaningfully to wellbeing?
Our tool is designed to go one better – it helps Kiwis identify ways to make savings while building wellbeing. It's free, takes about five minutes, and starts by simply showing you where your money is actually going, and where the biggest opportunities to save are.
Savings build a resilience buffer against cost-of-living increases, rather than automatically rebounding into further consumption. Where savings create discretionary spending, they can be used to support local businesses, instead of extractive systems.
The Power of Community
Building Coordination
Sufficiency is just as much about ensuring that Kiwis have enough to fulfil their needs, as it is about reducing overconsumption. Meeting everyone's needs can best be served by sharing and support systems at the community level, but these need to be built or reinforced. Community coordination systems can outperform markets and states concerning sustainable resource management. They use trust, reciprocity, and reputation as the operating mechanism, and produce the kind of cooperative behaviour change that is required at present. GoZero is designing and testing community coordination mechanisms.
GoZero Teams are small groups of at least four people — typically neighbours, colleagues, or friends — who connect regularly to practise sufficiency, map their community's resilience needs, and build the shared capacity to act collectively. As teams develop, they can choose how far they want to take their collective action: from household sufficiency and cost reduction, to community wealth-building and local resilience, to engagement on the systems change that makes sufficiency easier for everyone. GoZero is here to support teams at every stage.
Supporting Economies in Transition
Community Wealth Building
Relying on increasingly fragile systems to provide essentials, such as food and energy, presents real risks to Kiwis. Strengthening local economies and their ability to provide essentials and community wealth is increasingly important. The systems we have were designed for efficiency in a stable world that no longer exists, not the resilience that we need now.
GoZero's Buy Local platform promotes community wealth building. Community members are encouraged to support local businesses that are part of GoZero's network, as part of their more mindful consumption decisions. Businesses are encouraged to support our community coordination and resilience with donations, in return. Community members can point these donations to community activities in their area, using our rewards system. It's win-win.
Governance Through Crises
GoZero for Business
As we enter a period in which systemic impacts overtake the global economy's ability to grow, businesses will have to adapt to supply, demand and investment shocks. We are already seeing such disruptions beginning. Businesses that understand these risks and their causes, and can adapt their models to be resilient, face better outcomes.
GoZero offers advisory services to businesses, to help them understand systemic risk, build resilience and identify opportunities to transition away from threatened systems.
Optimising for Wellbeing
Aligning Personal and Ecosystem Wellbeing
GoZero works to help Kiwis live well in a healthy environment. Sufficiency helps us optimise consumption to provide wellbeing while reducing ecological harm. Beyond a certain threshold of income and consumption, additional wealth produces rapidly diminishing wellbeing returns — but the environmental damage keeps climbing.
There are nine fundamental human needs – subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, creation, identity, freedom – and satisfiers, which are the specific means by which needs are met.
Not all consumption meets real needs. Marketing and extractive economic systems have been extraordinarily effective at substituting commercially produced satisfiers for needs that could be met more cheaply, locally and effectively by other means. Genuine satisfiers meet multiple needs simultaneously at much lower material cost. Community, relationships, creative work and natural environments are highly efficient at meeting human needs, but they are also what markets have been replacing with commercially produced substitutes.
Why New Zealand?
A Good Place to Start
New Zealand is well suited as a place to innovate concerning sufficiency. Long, exposed supply chains for many manufactured goods and fuel make cost-of-living pressures from global disruption especially direct here, and make local resilience more valuable. We have a comparatively small population, substantial agricultural land, freshwater and renewable electricity already in place. We also have a track record of adopting social innovation — women's suffrage, nuclear-free legislation, a rights-of-nature approach — suggesting real capacity for this kind of change when the case for it is made well. Kiwi communities and culture – notably a wealth of indigenous knowledge that already exemplifies what sufficiency and living in harmony with nature looks like – make it an ideal setting for global leadership on the transition away from extractivism.
Why Now?
A Closing Window
Building sufficient local food networks, community energy, repair and maintenance capacity, and local supply chains requires resources: materials, energy, skills and capital. Those resources are currently available, but resource constraints are tightening, and the conditions for building sufficiency, wellbeing and resilience will only get harder to meet.
Financial system fragility, geopolitical reorganisation, material resource limits, demographic shifts, and the unwinding of globalised supply chains that currently deliver many essentials, are converging with ecological breakdown. This is making the timeline for building community-scale resilience more urgent than most planning frameworks assume. The choices made now will determine whether the transition away from extractivism happens by design or by disaster.