Issue 08 of The Possible, the thought leadership magazine I edit for global engineering firm WSP, is all about the hard choices facing policymakers on the way to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In particular, we consider the prospects for decarbonising concrete and steel, the two biggest and toughest targets for the built environment. Each contributes around 8% to man-made global emissions, and each has unique characteristics that will be indispensable for building all the infrastructure of a net-zero world (not to mention meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals for billions of people). We can decarbonise these materials, up to a point, but not without significant quantities of key green resources – renewable electricity being a big one – which are themselves carbon-intensive to develop and on which the decarbonisation plans for many other industries also rely. Ultimately it will be down to governments to cut through the double counting and decide where we can afford to “spend” a finite carbon budget. Our five-part series, “The realist’s road to zero”, aims to shed light on the critical pinch-points and highlight the areas where action is most urgently needed.
Apportioning resources – from space to mobility to nature – will become an increasingly fraught issue for urban planners in the decades to come. In this issue, we explore two other hot topics: what we’ll eat in a sustainable 21st-century food system, and how to reallocate road space to walking and cycling without alienating motorists.
Meanwhile, our Connecting Thinking contributors make the case for biodiversity offsets, propose health equality as the ultimate metric of sustainability, and explain how the fast-developing field of attribution science is aiding both climate action and adaptation.
And we have another amazing cover, the second of three, by Brazilian artist Fabrizio Lenci.
The other members of The Possible team are art director Sam Jenkins at Supermassive and production editor Nick Jones, my partner at Wordmule.
Download the PDF here, or click the images below.



