Mott MacDonald and North Star Transition announce partnership to drive system change

Mott MacDonald and North Star Transition have announced a partnership aiming to develop collaborative initiatives that address social inequality and the climate and biodiversity crises.

The partnership will create an integrated approach to enact and impact change at the systemic level, by bringing together North Star Transition’s experience in business, finance, and its unique Transition Lab capability with Mott MacDonald’s infrastructure, environmental and digital expertise. Both companies share the same vision and ambition for systems change and will use their joint knowledge and experience to bridge the gaps between businesses, communities, the environment, infrastructure assets and developments.

“We believe that to really affect change, solutions cannot be piecemeal. They must be applied system-wide and at scale,” said Brendan Bromwich, technical principal for systems thinking at Mott MacDonald.

Jyoti Banerjee, co-founder of North Star Transition pointed out that, “systems change will require deep collaboration between currently disconnected systems, such as food, agriculture, health, the environment, business and finance. The current system does not easily permit such collaboration or resource it in a way that enables substantive change.”

Mott MacDonald and North Star Transition will develop responses to multi-faceted challenges and offer a way to tackle the complex problems faced today.

Both organisations have already built up a track record of collaboration across multiple systems:

• In October 2020, North Star Transition, with support from Mott MacDonald, created and developed Wales Transition Lab, which brings together around forty organisations from farms, health boards, engineering, conservation, water, and finance at leadership level, to shape a regenerative system across Wales. A similar initiative, the Scotland Transition Lab, is now underway.
• Mott MacDonald and North Star Transition recently worked together with Anglian Water to assess the potential for investments in landscape scale interventions that could be made alongside the provision of two major new reservoirs. Around £900m of investments in agriculture, flood management and other natural capital related schemes were identified that could bring an estimated £5.7bn in co-benefits which would address major challenges in the Fenland areas in England which are vulnerable to flooding and drought associated with climate change.

Brendan added: “Mott MacDonald and North Star Transition are increasingly being recognised in the environmental and infrastructure sectors for our integrated approaches to systems thinking and system change. By establishing a formal partnership we are building on collaborative ways of working developed across numerous joint initiatives. We’re taking this experience forward across our endeavours to accelerate system change.”