The Symptoms
A World in Crisis
We live in a world facing interconnected economic, ecological and energy crises. Each of these presents real risks to the wellbeing and security of people, and the living world, now and into the future. These have been described as a polycrisis: multiple crises occurring at once, whose interactions make the combined effect worse than the sum of the parts.
In New Zealand, these crises are not experienced separately. Whether the impacts of far-off conflicts, supply chain disruptions, growing competition for the minerals our economies depend on, or extreme weather events driven by climate change, the impacts of these crises are showing up together. They are being experienced through the rising cost of essentials, deepening insecurity and hardship, and widening inequality.
We believe that current responses are insufficient to address the polycrisis, because they are aimed at the symptoms, not the cause. This diagnosis investigates the underlying drivers of these crises, to inform an approach that can deliver authentic progress.
Diagnosing Earth’s Ecological Health
Overshoot of Planetary Boundaries
The rising cost of living and accelerating climate change are symptoms of something deeper: the degradation of the ecological systems and resources upon which all economies and societies ultimately depend. A planetary health check shows that we are overshooting seven of nine major ecological boundaries.
Planetary boundaries are the safe limits for human pressure on the nine critical processes that together keep Earth's systems stable. They have been defined by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Crossing a boundary does not mean immediate collapse — it means rising risk of large-scale, abrupt, or irreversible change. These are not abstract scientific thresholds. They are the physical foundations of the stable, hospitable world all economies and communities depend on.
Credit: Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
Climate change
The boundary most people are familiar with, and the one narrow-boundary responses focus on almost exclusively. Overshoot drives more extreme weather, sea-level rise, and disruption to the agricultural systems food security depends on.
Biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss)
The average size of monitored wildlife populations has declined 73% since 1970, according to the WWF Living Planet Report 2024. This collapse degrades the natural systems that regulate climate, pollinate crops, and purify water and air.
Land-system change
The conversion of forests, wetlands, and other natural land to agricultural or urban use removes carbon sinks, degrades soil, and fragments the habitats species depend on.
Freshwater change
This is playing out in real time: the summer of 2026 brought record droughts and wildfires across Europe and North America, with rivers including the Rhine and Danube falling to record lows. Overshoot here shows up directly as water insecurity.
Biogeochemical flows
The disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, driven largely by fertiliser use and industrial processes. Overshoot causes algal blooms, dead zones in waterways, and long-term soil degradation.
Novel entities
Human-made substances — microplastics, PFAS ("forever chemicals"), and other synthetic compounds — that the planet's systems have no evolved capacity to process. These are now detectable in virtually every human body on Earth and in the most remote ecosystems.
Ocean acidification
The most recently confirmed breach, in 2025. Rising CO2 absorption is changing ocean chemistry, threatening the small calcifying species at the base of the marine food web and the food security of communities across the globe.
Stratospheric ozone depletion
The one boundary with a genuine recovery story. The Montreal Protocol phased out the CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer, and the boundary has held within safe limits since — proof that coordinated global action on a planetary boundary is possible.
Atmospheric aerosol loading
Fine particles released into the atmosphere by industry, agriculture and combustion affect cloud formation and regional weather patterns, including monsoon systems. Not yet assessed as breached at a global level, though regional thresholds are a growing concern.
The Root Cause
Consumption beyond limits
The root cause of the overshoot of planetary boundaries is overconsumption. We are extracting and consuming more than our planet can provide and polluting more than it can absorb. Globally, we are now extracting and consuming so much per year that it would take the equivalent of 1.73 planet Earths to do so sustainably. If everyone in the world lived like the average New Zealander, we would need 3.7 Earths — New Zealand's own Country Overshoot Day falls on April 10, day 100 of the year, according to the Global Footprint Network. This overconsumption degrades living systems and impoverishes the future we leave for our children and generations to come.
The overshoot of planetary boundaries began in the early 1970s, and we are seeing evidence of its impacts appearing across many different sectors, all at once. This is not a net-zero target to hit in decades to come — we are already decades beyond the safe zone.
Around the same time this overshoot was beginning, the Club of Rome's landmark 1972 study The Limits to Growth modelled exactly this trajectory: unconstrained growth in a finite system leads to overshoot, then collapse, unless deliberately curbed. A 2021 peer-reviewed analysis by researcher Gaya Herrington compared the model's scenarios against fifty years of real-world data across population, resources, pollution and industrial output. The two scenarios that tracked closest to what's actually happened both end in collapse — one, driven by ecological damage rather than resource scarcity, projects global wellbeing stalling around 2030, with collapse setting in around 2040.
The Mechanism
Extractivism
Overconsumption doesn't happen in a vacuum. It is manufactured and sustained by a system that profits from it — a system with no incentive to acknowledge limits to extraction and growth, because its own gains depend on ignoring them. The economic benefits of that overconsumption are disproportionately going to a wealthy minority. In June 2026, EY's Global New Economy Unit published research giving this pattern a name: extractivism.
Extractivism is defined as the structural tendency of the current economic system to privatise gains for a concentrated minority while externalising social and ecological costs. EY calls this a market failure. GoZero sees it differently: markets are working exactly as intended — optimising consumption, ignoring limits.
According to EY's research, material extraction tripled from 27 billion tons in 1970 to 105 billion tons in 2024, and we will require two Earths by 2030 and three by 2050. The richest 1% now control 42% of global wealth, while the bottom half of humanity holds less than 1%. Using data from 2000 to 2023, the report finds that shareholder dividends in G7 economies have grown three times faster than wages and twice as fast as corporate taxes, while the wellbeing cost of inequality has grown 45% and the economic cost of biodiversity loss has grown 60% since 2000. This helps us understand the cause of the rising cost of living: when gains are concentrated and costs externalised, someone eventually bears them.
Extractivism, Accelerated
AI: extractivism of the mind, not just the earth
Artificial intelligence infrastructure is turbo-charging extractivism across every domain at once, at a scale already pushing major technology companies to walk back the climate commitments they made before the AI boom.
Engagement-optimised feeds capture attention at a scale no earlier system could match. Emerging evidence indicates that routinely delegating thinking to AI chatbots weakens critical thinking and memory. Emotional attachment to AI companions is following a similar pattern, with genuine, sometimes harmful attachment that can displace real relationships. AI systems are also trained on humanity's creative and intellectual output, typically extracted without consent or compensation.
AI-focused data centre electricity demand grew 50% in 2025 alone, and roughly 40% of the additional electricity data centres need through 2030 is still expected to come from gas and coal. International Energy Agency analysis projects data centres will need 512,000 tonnes of copper a year by 2030 — mineral extraction with real consequences across planetary boundaries.
Material extraction, psychological extraction, knowledge extraction: gains for a few, costs for everyone else. AI does not introduce a new problem. It moves the existing one faster.
The Risks
Planetary Insolvency
Cost-of-living pressures are the leading edge of more serious impacts: the UK's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries have released reports showing that we are on track for "Planetary Insolvency" due to climate change and ecological tipping points — a state in which Earth's systems become so degraded that humans can no longer receive enough of the critical services they rely on to support societies and economies.
In their January 2026 report – Parasol Lost: Recovery Plan Needed, they find that global heating is likely to reach 2°C before 2050, which risks major disruption to food and water systems, and catastrophic social and economic impacts. The cost of climate and ecological damage is expected to overtake the global economy’s ability to grow between 1.5°C and 2°C. They have also stated that there is no realistic plan currently in place to avoid this. This is the finding of a professional body whose job is caution, not alarm. On the IFoA's own current warming-trend estimates, 1.5°C is on track to be passed around 2029, and 2°C is likely by 2050.
In their extreme scenario, catastrophic warming of 3°C by 2050 is now deemed possible. Their extreme scenario also identifies the risk of 4 billion deaths. A similar warning comes from Dr. Günther Thallinger, a member of the Board of Management of insurer Allianz SE, overseeing Investment Management, Global Health, and Sustainability (ESG): “At 3°C of global heating, climate damage cannot be insured against, covered by governments, or adapted to... The financial sector as we know it ceases to function.”
Why Current Approaches Aren’t Working
Markets always drive consumption
Current approaches to the cost-of-living, whether financial and tax support or consumer and market regulations, only address the symptoms. Similarly, sustainability approaches, which focus on efficiency and renewable energy technologies, inherit the same optimising logic that drives extractivism: they compete on lowest cost per unit, and lowest cost drives volume, and volume drives growth. A market-based solution to overconsumption is a contradiction in terms — markets exist to grow consumption, not reduce it. They focus on a single symptom, for example carbon emissions, rather than the root cause: overconsumption itself.
Reducing pressure on the climate change boundary while shifting pressure onto other boundaries isn't a viable strategy. The manufacture of solar panels, electric vehicles, and battery storage systems depends on lithium, cobalt, copper, rare earths, and other materials whose extraction drives habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, water depletion, and pollution in the communities and ecosystems where mining occurs. Electrification is marketed as the solution — but swapping one form of extraction for another is still extractivism.
Campaigns to "Electrify Everything" avoid the prior question. Do we need to electrify every lawn mower, every fossil-fuelled vehicle, at the scale current consumption assumes — or can shared solutions meet the same household and community needs more equitably, with far less ecological impact and cost?
Even where efficiency and renewables genuinely reduce carbon intensity, gains get eaten up by the growth in consumption they enable — the rebound effect, also known as Jevons' Paradox. A household that insulates its home, for example, may simply heat it to a higher temperature instead of banking the saving.
Coordination, Not Competition
Blame the maze, not the mouse
Conventional sustainability actions — individual carbon footprinting, green consumerism, electrification — treat the problem as a series of consumer choices to be optimised rather than a systemic coordination failure to be addressed collectively. They place the burden on individuals, but the main levers for change are collective and systemic. People are trapped in a system of competition gone wrong.
The failure of these approaches is not evidence that people are apathetic or selfish. It is evidence of the wrong theory of change. People are not the problem; the absence of coordination mechanisms is the problem. When consuming less puts you at a disadvantage relative to those who don't, when the social signals all point toward consumption, when no shared infrastructure exists to make collective action possible, then asking individuals to act alone is not a strategy. Addressing this requires effective coordination mechanisms, which is a core part of GoZero's response at the community level.
A groundbreaking 2023 peer-reviewed paper by the New Zealand-based Merz Institute — The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot — argues that many of the behaviours keeping people locked inside this trap are innate, once-adaptive impulses that have been deliberately and systematically targeted: the pursuit of pleasure, status and short-term gain, engineered and exploited by economic systems built to maximise consumption. People are not failing to escape the maze. The maze has, in places, been built and refined specifically to keep them inside it.
Inequality
The uneven cost of extractivism
The EY report cited above also detailed how welfare, biodiversity and climate-related losses fall unevenly — within economies on workers rather than capital owners, and between economies on the Global South, which bears a disproportionate share of the damage. This concentration is visible directly in who drives overshoot. The wealthiest quarter of humanity is responsible for 74% of the world's excess energy and material use beyond sustainable levels; the wealthiest 10% for between 25% and 43% of total environmental impact, and 47% of CO2 emissions. The poorest half of humanity, by contrast, accounts for only 10% of emissions.
Electrification technologies also have an equity problem. Heat pumps, electric vehicles, solar panels and batteries are being marketed on the household savings they generate, but those savings disproportionately accrue to more affluent households, who have the capital to invest in the upfront costs of electrification in the first place.
Reducing consumption does not require capital to unlock. You do not need to own your home, or have savings to invest in solar panels or a heat pump. It is accessible to renters, to lower-income households, and to the communities that most need relief from cost-of-living pressures.
A Different Approach is Needed
Sufficiency First
EY's report also names what the alternative looks like: a shift from extractivism to regeneration, built around five principles: sufficiency, circularity, systems thinking, redefined value, and equity and justice.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identifies three main ways that we can 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."
In both cases, sufficiency comes first, but the global response has been doing things back to front, starting with efficiency and renewables. The sufficiency test comes first: we must ask whether extraction or consumption is necessary to meet essential needs, or whether it is simply reinforcing extractivism and overconsumption. Where it passes the test, then efficiency measures and renewable energy can be deployed, and regenerative design becomes relevant. Where consumption is degenerative, no amount of efficiency or renewables validate it. Sufficiency can reduce the overshoot of all planetary boundaries. Efficiency and renewables don't.
Our Prognosis
It's time for sufficiency
The IPCC and EY both point to the need for sufficiency strategies, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre's measurement of the overshoot of planetary boundaries indicates the extent of the actions required. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries' work shows us the risks if we don't act.
Globally, while trillions of dollars have been invested in efficiency technologies and renewable energy infrastructure, sufficiency measures have hardly received any investment or attention, because sufficiency has no product to sell. It doesn't fit into the market-driven approaches that have been relied on. It is time to back innovation in sufficiency.
GoZero helps households and communities to practice sufficiency and coordinate to develop shared community wealth, support local economies and push for the systems transformation needed to build resilience and wellbeing.