Our Values
What we believe
We are living through a polycrisis. Our diagnosis shows the damage overconsumption is already doing to the living world — and the risk of ecosystem, economic and social collapse we face if extractivism continues unchecked.
We believe that everyone deserves to live well, in just and resilient communities, within the boundaries of a liveable planet.
We've found that sufficiency-first strategies build community and ecosystem resilience and wellbeing while reducing overconsumption — and that coordination mechanisms are what make that possible at scale. Our approach is to innovate at the local level: establishing sufficiency and community coordination that protects our communities and ecosystems from harm.
How We Differ
Root causes, not symptoms
We believe that failing systems — whatever form that failure takes — undermine the dignity, wellbeing and security of people and communities. We believe that responses which treat symptoms rather than root causes will keep failing, however well intentioned and however much investment they attract. This is why GoZero focuses on diagnosing and addressing root causes, not the symptoms most approaches are built to treat.
GoZero conducted a project working with small Wellington businesses to measure and reduce their carbon emissions, in partnership with other Wellington organisations, exploring efficiency, renewable energy and transport options together. That experience showed, firsthand, both what efficiency-led approaches can achieve and their limits when applied without addressing the underlying demand and consumption patterns driving emissions in the first place.
GoZero's response follows that same logic. At the household level, that means reducing costs and consumption where it doesn't serve real wellbeing — which is what the Sufficiency Savings Tool, described next, is built for. At the community level, it means coordinating with others, since lasting change needs more than any one household acting alone — which is what GoZero Teams are built for. Both are the practical starting point. The local economy and systems-level work described later in this document builds from what happens here first.
Sufficiency Savings Tool
See what your household could save
GoZero has developed a Sufficiency Savings Tool that shows households where they can reduce costs, category by category — insurance, food, transport, energy and more. 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 can also build toward a Resilience Fund for your own community — more on that below.
GoZero Teams
Coordination at the neighbourhood level
At the core of our work are GoZero Teams: 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 deliberative democratic engagement on the systems change that makes sufficiency easier for everyone. GoZero is here to support teams at every stage.
The entry point is practical and immediate: reducing household costs, building local resilience, connecting with neighbours. If you're interested in why this approach works — the thinking behind sufficiency, coordination and the levels GoZero operates at — that's what the rest of this page explains.
Live Better, Live Lighter
Sufficiency as substitution, not sacrifice
Sufficiency is not about going without. It is about substitution: replacing fragile, expensive, ecologically costly systems with local capacity, community resilience, and access to essentials that genuinely provide wellbeing. The goal is to live better, by living lighter — to secure what matters, reduce what doesn't, and build the local systems that remain viable as external pressures increase.
This reframes the question from "how much are you willing to give up?" to "what do you actually need, and how can you get it more reliably, at less cost, with less exposure to volatile systems?" Sufficiency, understood this way, is not austerity. It is a rational response to a system that is becoming less reliable and more expensive.
Universal access to essentials — food, water, energy, shelter, community — within planetary limits is the positive vision. Not a smaller version of the same system, but a different and more resilient one.
Closing the Rebound Loop
Where the savings go matters as much as making them
Sufficiency is not immune to the same rebound failure mode that limits efficiency and renewables. If the money saved by consuming less of one thing simply flows into more consumption elsewhere, the saving isn't real, it's just relocated. A household that saves on groceries and spends the difference on a long-haul flight has not actually saved anything, and may have made overshoot worse. Sufficiency only delivers on its promise if the savings it generates are directed somewhere that doesn't recreate the problem.
This is why GoZero's Sufficiency Savings Tool doesn't stop at showing households what they could save. It proposes building a Resilience Fund where a portion of those savings is set aside to build a buffer against cost-of-living increases. Where the savings create discretionary spending capacity, they can be allocated to support local businesses and community wealth-building and coordination, rather than further personal consumption.
GoZero is building a local business network to support its community resilience work, through its rewards system.
In February 2026, the Scottish Parliament passed the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act — the first national legislation of its kind anywhere in the world — requiring public bodies to redirect procurement spending toward local businesses. What GoZero is building is inspired by this, and is looking to create a mechanism that redirects spending on essentials to strengthen the resilience of local economies rather than fuel extractivism.
Households that already have solar panels or electric vehicles shouldn't feel bad — but the savings those investments generate should flow into sufficiency practice and community resilience, not further consumption. For those who don't yet have them, collective infrastructure that extends access to everyone, not just those with capital, is the more equitable path.
GoZero's Response
A different logic, with different aims
Sufficiency aims at something specific: genuine wellbeing, achieved without overconsuming the resources that wellbeing depends on. That's the test it applies to every choice — not lowest cost, but whether something actually contributes to living well. Market-based approaches aim at something else: growing consumption, because that's what markets are built to reward, whether or not more consumption makes life better. The aim is what differs, not the scale.
Lasting change happens together. GoZero Teams work because small groups build shared habits and hold each other to them, turning individual savings into something that actually sticks — and giving people a genuine way to face rising costs collectively, alongside others doing the same thing.
Community savings, shared resources and local resilience are built through collaboration — people working together toward something none of them could build alone. That's what Teams practise, and it's what turns short-term relief into lasting resilience.
Our Framework
What wellbeing actually requires, and where the limits are
Sufficiency depends on knowing what genuinely delivers wellbeing. Human needs — security, connection, purpose, a sense of control over your own life — are fairly universal. What people are sold to meet them often isn't. More consumption doesn't reliably mean more wellbeing, which is why sufficiency asks a different question than "can you afford more" — it asks whether more is actually what you need.
The framework behind this is Doughnut Economics: a safe space to live well sits between an ecological ceiling — the limits we shouldn't exceed — and a social floor — the minimum everyone should have. GoZero's work is about keeping households and communities inside that space, reducing pressure from both directions.
That space isn't fixed. As costs rise and essential services come under strain, the floor rises to meet people where they are — while the ceiling above continues to press down. Building resilience now, while it's still possible to do so affordably, matters more the longer that gap keeps narrowing.
Underpinning all of this is what GoZero calls the resource lens: testing every decision, from a household budget to a business choice, by whether it reduces dependence on costly, unreliable systems and builds something that lasts.
Why New Zealand
A good place to start
New Zealand is well suited as a place to test sufficiency, for practical reasons rather than any claim of exceptionalism. Long, exposed supply chains for many manufactured goods and fuel make cost-of-living pressure from global disruption especially direct here — and make local resilience correspondingly more valuable. A comparatively small population, combined with substantial per-capita agricultural land, freshwater and renewable electricity already in place, makes household- and community-scale models genuinely testable at a national level. New Zealand has 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. New Zealand's 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 leadership on the transition away from extractivism to a wiser form of living.
New Zealand's own consumption is part of the global problem — if everyone lived as New Zealanders currently do, humanity would need 3.7 planet Earths. But by a different measure, New Zealand is unusual: it has no Country Deficit Day. Its own biocapacity — the land, water and ecosystems within its borders — covers 154% of what its population actually consumes. Most high-consumption countries run in the opposite direction, depending on resources imported from elsewhere to make up what their own land can't provide. This doesn't make New Zealand's current consumption sustainable. It means the physical foundation for a genuinely sufficient New Zealand already exists — unlike many places, the resource base to meet everyone's essential needs within New Zealand's own limits is already there. What's missing is aligning how those resources are used with what they can actually, sustainably provide.
This isn't a claim that New Zealand is uniquely deserving, or that the answer is to consume only what's made locally rather than address why supply chains are fragile in the first place. It's a practical observation about where a model like this is most likely to be built and proven.
Why Now
A closing window, not a stable one
Our Diagnosis set out the scale of harm if current trajectories continue. What follows here is a narrower point, about timing rather than consequences: building sufficient local systems — local food networks, community energy, repair and maintenance capacity, local supply chains — requires resources: materials, energy, skills, capital. Those resources are currently available, but resource constraints are tightening, and the conditions for building that resilience will only get harder to meet.
A second, more immediate pressure sits alongside this one. Financial system fragility, geopolitical reorganisation, and the gradual unwinding of the globalised supply chains that deliver New Zealand's food, fuel, medicine, and manufactured goods are converging with ecological pressure in ways that make the timeline for community-scale resilience more urgent than most planning frameworks assume.
None of this is a call to panic. The choices made now will determine whether the transition to more resilient local systems happens by design or by default.