When people learn that my career is about tackling climate change and advancing ecological sustainability, I am sometimes asked, with an agonising, sheepish look, “But there is hope, right?”

The question is asked as if, were I to say “No,” then I would be failing in some moral way; not them, nor anyone else. The question always feels loaded, as if I am responsible for their sense of hope, and if I don’t give it to them, I am being somehow heartless or cruel.

Whether we succeed or not in preventing the climate and nature crisis from deepening and causing even greater catastrophes, is that my personal moral failure? Reasonable people could differ on whether I’ve led a moral life, but I think I do okay in that respect.

By contrast, I agree that the deepening crisis is symbolic of my personal professional failure.

Everyone who works on sustainability is, ultimately, a failure if the climate and nature crisis leads to much deeper human and biodiversity collapse. To use a high profile example: I have the deepest respect and admiration for Jane Goodall, her life’s work and her immense capabilities and reach. And yet, ultimately, biodiversity declined throughout her career, despite some small wins here and there.

What I would argue, though, is that sustainability professionals bare only the tiniest responsibility.

Our main failure has been that we did not develop and socialise a series of pragmatic policy proposals to tackle the root cause of non-sustainability, which is the rapacious extractive economic system that is embedded so completely into our collective psychology and political cultures that living sustainably is virtually impossible. Doughnut Economics is a brilliant attempt at a practical policy tool, but despite its brilliance, its adoption has been unfortunately limited.

Since that rapacious economic system still flourishes, that brings me back to the question, Is there hope?

Even without the moral overtones, the question of hope is still complicated. It’s presented as a closed, yes or no question, but the climate and nature crisis is nowhere near that simple.

There are reasons for genuine anxiety. Most sustainability professionals I know lose sleep, literally, because of the stress caused by having expert knowledge and, therefore, being a voyeur on the end of the world as we know it. Terrible things are now locked in and unpreventable. (And it would be morally questionable if all we did was say, “I told you so”, even though we feel it.)

An important part of why this is so stressful is that sustainability professionals also know that the climate and nature crisis was entirely preventable; that we could stop the harmful things humanity is doing; that we could turn the ship around; but also that the extractive economic system is too big and too powerful, and it is bolstered by people, values and cultures that do not, or refuse to understand, or simply don’t care about the calamities being created by the system they support.

The public is increasingly aware that the rapacious economic system is failing them, but more and more people seem to be—instead of looking for genuinely effective solutions—going down the rabbit hole presented by populists. When it comes to scientific literacy, populists are, at best, ignorant and, at worst, environmental despots, making our futures less safe and less prosperous.

And so, with growing support for populists who want to dump the Paris Agreement and ‘net zero’ (which is, in any case, only a piss-weak target, far short of what’s needed for public safety), we sustainability professionals see our communities sliding further away from solving the climate and nature crisis.

The economic, technological, policy and behavioural solutions all exist.

Read that again. The economic, technological, policy and behavioural solutions all exist.

The fundamental problem is that there is still—130 years after the first peer-reviewed scientific paper on anthropogenic global warming—a social licence for environmental bads, like fossil fuels, and insufficient social licence and, indeed, demand for truly ambitious and effective environmental and economic reforms.

There is only hope if we can invert that social licence crisis; if we can deprive environmental bads of public acceptance, and if we can create a sufficient number of us demanding those ambitious environmental and economic reforms.

If your approach to sustainability is just ‘hope’ and leaving it to others, then you risk accepting that just isn’t enough of us to create the necessary momentum for reform.

If, on the other hand, you’re prepared to act, then there is hope that things will be less bad.