Our Approach
Searching for credible, authentic responses to the crises we face
GoZero is a work in progress. We don't claim to have all the answers. What we do claim is that we are searching for them rigorously — guided by the best available science, and committed to approaches that genuinely work rather than approaches that merely appear to work.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. History shows that change does not automatically equal progress. The widespread adoption of leaded petrol improved engine performance for decades before we understood the catastrophic cost to children's neurological development. Asbestos was celebrated as a miracle material — fire-resistant, durable, affordable — before its role in causing lung cancer became undeniable. In both cases, the technology was adopted at scale, the harms were real but diffuse and slow to appear, and the industries that profited worked hard to delay the reckoning.
Today, PFAS — so-called "forever chemicals" used in everything from non-stick cookware to food packaging — are now detectable in the blood of virtually every person on Earth, and in the most remote ecosystems. Microplastics have been found in human hearts, placentas, and breast milk. We are running the same pattern: adoption at scale, diffuse harm, and a lag between cause and consequence that allows the problem to compound before it is acknowledged.
The Consilience Project, which studies how societies navigate complex challenges, frames the test clearly: "For a change to equal progress, it must systematically identify and internalize its externalities as far as reasonably possible." Read their work on progress here.
This is the test we apply to our own work, and to the solutions we evaluate. It is why sufficiency — reducing consumption rather than substituting one form of it for another — sits at the heart of what we do.
The Challenge
Overshoot and planetary boundaries
According to Stockholm University's Stockholm Resilience Centre, planetary boundaries are the safe limits for human pressure on the nine critical processes that together maintain a stable and resilient Earth. Crossing boundaries increases the risk of generating large-scale abrupt or irreversible environmental changes.
Seven of the nine boundaries have now been transgressed: climate change; freshwater change; land system change; biosphere integrity (biodiversity); novel entities (including microplastics and PFAS); and biogeochemical flows (the disruption of nitrogen and phosphorus cycles that sustain life). We broke through the ocean acidification boundary in 2025, which risks imminent global marine ecosystem collapse.
Ecological overshoot is when humanity takes more ecological resources from the planet than it can regenerate. If everyone lived as we do in New Zealand, we would require three planets worth of resources each year. The everyday cost-of-living crisis — rising food, water, energy and insurance costs — is not separate from this. It is what overshoot looks like when it starts showing up in household budgets.
No Silver Bullets
Technology alone won't get us there
Many popular technology-based solutions to the ecological crisis require significant resources that risk worsening the overshoot of planetary boundaries. The resources required for EV and home storage batteries involve extraction that risks significantly worsening freshwater depletion and biodiversity loss — resource extraction is reportedly responsible for up to 80% of biodiversity loss globally.
The advent of AI compounds this: it requires significant new energy production (which prevents new renewables from displacing fossil fuels), increases resource extraction, worsens biodiversity loss, and depletes fresh water at scale.
This is the externality problem again. These technologies may reduce one form of harm while creating others that are harder to see, diffuse in their effects, and slow to be acknowledged — the same pattern as lead, asbestos, and PFAS.
We need to consume less and better, waste less, and innovate in ways that do not address one boundary at the expense of others. That is the test sufficiency applies.
Sufficiency-First
Starting from the right place
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies three main ways to reduce emissions: Sufficiency, Efficiency and Renewables. Sufficiency, which has the potential to deliver 40–70% emissions reductions, 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."
Importantly, sufficiency measures must be used first — before efficiency and renewables — for these to deliver real impact. But we have been doing things back to front. Efficiency works through marginal improvements, but total emissions continue to grow as demand grows. Renewables allow for more efficient use of energy, but total consumption grows with falling costs. Neither addresses demand. Neither passes the externalities test.
Demand-side sufficiency is the only pathway to reduce the overshoot of all planetary boundaries simultaneously. Globally, while trillions of dollars have been invested in efficiency and renewables, sufficiency has received almost none. The reason is structural: sufficiency has no product to sell, no return to capture, no business model to fund. GoZero is working to change that.
Key Issues
What conventional approaches get wrong
Rebound
Efficiency improvements and cost savings lead to increased consumption that partially or fully eats up the original gain. Cheaper energy stimulates more activity; household electrification savings flow into further consumption. The efficiency gain is absorbed by growth. Unlike sufficiency, efficiency cannot break this cycle — it can only slow it.
Coordination
Conventional responses treat overconsumption as a series of individual consumer choices to be optimised rather than a systemic coordination failure to be addressed collectively. They ask people to act alone, against their immediate interests, with no shared benefit. The failure of individual approaches is not evidence of apathy — it is evidence of the wrong theory of change.
Externalities
Most current "solutions" do not systematically identify and internalise their externalities. EVs, AI infrastructure, and large-scale renewables all carry ecological costs that are real but diffuse, slow to appear, and easy to ignore — repeating the pattern of lead, asbestos and PFAS. Authentic progress requires accounting for the full cost, not just the visible one.
Our Framework
Doughnut Economics and the resource lens
The framework that makes sense of what our response needs to achieve is Doughnut Economics, developed by economist Kate Raworth. The doughnut's outer ring is the ecological ceiling — the planetary boundaries we must not exceed. Its inner ring is the social foundation: the minimum conditions of human wellbeing that no one should fall below. The goal is to live in the safe and just space between them. GoZero's work addresses both boundaries simultaneously.
Underpinning all of this is what GoZero calls the resource lens: a way of evaluating choices — from household decisions to national policy — by asking which systems reduce dependency on complex supply chains and depleting resources, which can be built and maintained using local skills and materials, and which remain viable as energy and materials become more constrained. This lens distinguishes genuine resilience from solutions that simply substitute one form of market dependency for another.
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. The deeper theory of change is shared openly with those who want to engage with it, but it is not the front door.
Sufficiency Savings Tool
A practical starting point
GoZero has developed a Sufficiency Savings Tool that allows users to find ways to make savings by reducing consumption in line with sufficiency practices. The tool has inbuilt mechanisms to counter the rebound effect, by channelling discretionary income that users generate towards community resilience and wealth-building rather than further personal consumption.
Achieving Authentic Progress
How GoZero is different
Coordination over individual action
Overconsumption is a coordination failure, not a moral failing. GoZero builds coordination mechanisms — at the scale of the street, the suburb, and the city — that change the incentive structure for everyone simultaneously. The target is the system, not the individual.
Community over platform
Online tools alone cannot create the conditions for sustained change. GoZero Teams are designed around the criteria that evidence shows are necessary for complex social change: small, locally embedded groups with overlapping relationships, regular in-person contact, and mutual accountability.
Democratic legitimacy
The ongoing deliberation within GoZero Teams — mapping risks, sharing knowledge, developing collective positions — functions as a continuous citizens' assembly at the neighbourhood level. When teams engage with local decision-makers, they bring the legitimacy of real deliberation behind them.
Equity by design
Sufficiency does not require capital to unlock. Unlike electrification programmes that are structurally unavailable to those without savings or home ownership, sufficiency practices are accessible to renters, lower-income households, and the communities that most need relief from cost-of-living pressure.