Kavan Choksi believes it is best to admit that society cannot address the new problems that climate change presents using outdated concepts if it is to make transformational changes.

Natural resource use in the global economy has been linear since the beginning of the first industrial revolution. The take-make-waste model has been fully integrated into the modern economy: extraction, transformation, production, use, and disposal.

The World Economic Forum emphasized that, excluding emissions from transportation and energy in non-residential structures, approximately half of emissions contributing to climate change come from the production and consumption of ordinary things. When those are considered, the percentage of global emissions is 70%. On the current course, society will consume 60% more resources than the planet can support while producing much too much trash.

Kavan Choksi believes the demand for these commodities will rise along with the global population and consumption, increasing emissions and accelerating the effects of climate change. As Choksi points out, the demand for food worldwide is similarly expected to rise by 42%. As a result, merely continuing with existing food-industry methods alone will result in the world far exceeding its global carbon budget.

A different direction

Kavan Choksi believes that more significant collaborations are crucial to driving new definitions of how the UAE uses items and what it does with them afterward to reform every component of its take-make-waste system. In contrast to the current consumption model, the circular economy is a vital model emphasizing sharing, reusing, and recycling goods and resources to maximize their worth. As a result, Kavan Choksi believes moving toward a circular economy will be among the most important future measures.

Since just an estimated 8.6% of the global economy is currently circular, corporations stand to have access to a $4.5 trillion market by 2030. Kavan Choksi believes the circular economy and climate change mitigation go hand in hand, so circular economy initiatives should be able to greatly reduce emissions. In fact, as he points out, circular economy initiatives could reduce emissions in the building sector by up to 61 percent. However, commercial obligations frequently depend on cues and instructions from regional authorities.

By implementing regulations that foster a favorable environment for sustainable innovation, the UAE is quickly taking the lead in the region. The UAE released the UAE Circular Economy policy in January 2021. The report discussed creating a sustainable economy by efficiently using natural resources, switching to cleaner energy sources, and integrating cutting-edge technologies (such as artificial intelligence AI and 4IR) to encourage more sustainable consumption and production patterns. Last month, the Council adopted 22 policies by the Circular Economy Policies Committee, a subsidiary organization that works to advance circular economy models across four key industries: manufacturing, food, infrastructure, and transportation.

Networking and collaboration allow species to survive more successfully than they would as individuals, which is a key concept of evolution. In the end, Kavan Choksi thinks these partnerships innovate by accepting the most unlikely partners to flourish in uncertain circumstances.