About Us
Our Vision
A world in which everyone lives well, in just and resilient communities, within the boundaries of a liveable planet.
Our Mission
To end overconsumption and the overshoot of Earth's planetary boundaries, to prevent ecological collapse and human suffering. We work to see sufficiency-first approaches adopted in policy and practice, at the household, community and national levels.
Our Structure
GoZero and the GoZero Foundation are independent organisations that work together to deliver the shared vision and mission above. GoZero operates and improves the platform. The GoZero Foundation, which is a registered charitable trust, coordinates the community work through GoZero Teams.
The Problem We're Responding To
We currently face ecological breakdown, rising cost of living, supply chain fragility, growing inequality, and the erosion of community wellbeing. GoZero began its work with a focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As our work has developed, we have gained key insights about the root causes and wide-boundary, systemic nature of our predicament, concerning which climate change is just one important element. Authentic progress requires that we address complexity and take a holistic ecological and resource-conscious approach.
Key insights
Overshoot: Our current crises share a common root: overproduction and overconsumption, leading to the overshoot of planetary boundaries. This is enabled by economic systems built on the assumption of endless growth, cheap energy, and accessible raw materials, which extract value from communities and natural systems rather than sustaining them. We have now breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries that define the safe operating space for human civilisation and life on the planet.
Rebound: The rebound effect describes what happens when efficiency improvements or cost savings lead to increased consumption that partially or fully eats up the original gain. When manufacturing becomes more energy-efficient, the cost of production falls, prices drop, demand rises, and overall output increases. The efficiency gain is absorbed by growth.
Renewables face a similar problem. Cheaper solar and wind energy reduces the cost of electricity. Lower energy costs stimulate economic activity and consumption. The emissions intensity of each unit of energy falls, but the total amount of energy consumed grows, and if that growth is fast enough, absolute emissions can still rise even as the grid gets greener. This is also true at the household level. The push for home electrification uses cost savings as the prime motivator, but these savings create a rebound effect leading to increased consumption of goods and services, erasing any climate gains. Investment in individual solutions, from rooftop solar to electric vehicles, disproportionately benefits those with the capital to access them, while leaving lower-income households and renters behind.
Sufficiency-first: the IPCC cites the SER framework as the way to reduce emissions. This stands for Sufficiency - Efficiency - Renewables, in which sufficiency measures to reduce demand must come before efficiency and renewables, if we are to achieve success. Globally, while trillions of dollars have been invested in efficiency technologies and renewable energy infrastructure, oil consumption and emissions hit record highs in 2025. Demand-side sufficiency, the IPCC's highest-potential lever for climate mitigation, is the only pathway to reduce overshoot, but has hardly received any investment or attention. The reason is structural: sufficiency has no product to sell, no return to capture, no business model to fund.
Coordination: Conventional responses treat the problem as a series of consumer choices to be optimised rather than a systemic coordination failure to be addressed collectively. They ask people to act alone, in private, against their immediate interests, in a system that offers no coordination mechanism and no shared benefit. The failure of individual 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, and is where GoZero focuses its work.
Our Approach
The framework that makes sense of what our response needs to achieve is Doughnut Economics, developed by economist Kate Raworth. The doughnut's outer ring is the ecological ceiling; the planetary boundaries we must not exceed. Its inner ring is the social foundation: the minimum conditions of human wellbeing that no one should fall below, including food, energy, housing, health, and democratic voice. The goal is to live in the safe and just space between them. GoZero's work addresses both boundaries simultaneously, reducing ecological overshoot through sufficiency, and strengthening the social foundation through community resilience and shared infrastructure.
Our work starts from the premise that the most effective responses to the interlocking crises we face are collective: sufficiency practised together rather than alone; community wealth-building that keeps economic resources circulating locally rather than extracted by distant supply chains; care economies that reduce total consumption while strengthening social connection; and investment in local businesses and shared infrastructure that build stronger, smaller, more resilient local economies, that can provide access to basic essentials for all.
Sufficiency, which involves consuming less, not just consuming differently, sits at the heart of this. The IPCC identifies demand-side sufficiency measures as capable of reducing global emissions by 40 to 70 percent by 2050, making it the highest-potential lever available for climate mitigation. Sufficiency is also the most direct response to cost-of-living pressure, supply chain fragility and the concentration of economic power that leaves communities without resilience.
Unlike efficiency and renewables-first approaches, sufficiency practised collectively addresses the rebound effect directly: when savings flow into shared community systems rather than further personal consumption, the benefits compound rather than cancel out.
Shared systems, community wealth building and democratic participation are the most rational investments available against the full range of ecological, economic, security and social pressures that communities face.
Underpinning all of this is what GoZero calls the resource lens: a way of evaluating choices, from household decisions to community infrastructure to national policy, by asking which systems reduce dependency on complex supply chains and depleting resources, which can be built and maintained using local skills and materials, and which remain viable as energy and materials become more constrained. This lens distinguishes genuine resilience from solutions that simply substitute one form of market dependency for another. It is the analytical framework that guides GoZero's work at every scale, and the basis on which GoZero advocates for infrastructure and procurement decisions that are coherent with the world we are moving into, rather than optimised for a world that is passing.
GoZero Teams
At the core of our work are GoZero Teams: small groups of at least four people, typically neighbours, colleagues, or friends, who connect regularly to practise sufficiency, map their community's resilience needs, and build the shared capacity to act collectively. Teams are supported by GoZero's community weavers, who are organisers embedded in specific geographic areas whose job is facilitation and capacity building.
As teams develop, they can choose how far they want to take their collective action, from household sufficiency and cost reduction, to community wealth building and local resilience, to deliberative advocacy for the systems change that makes sufficiency easier for everyone. GoZero is here to support teams at every stage of that journey.
The entry point is practical and immediate: reducing household costs, building local resilience, connecting with neighbours. The deeper theory of change is shared openly with those who want to engage with it, but it is not the front door.
Achieving authentic progress
Taking a holistic, systems approach that includes the following elements is vital to our efforts to achieve authentic progress.
Sufficiency
The IPCC identifies sufficiency as the only pathway to ending the overshoot of planetary boundaries. GoZero puts this at the centre of everything it does, not as an add-on to a renewables strategy, but as the foundation without which the other pillars cannot achieve their potential.
Coordination over individual action
Overconsumption is a coordination failure, not a moral failing. GoZero builds the coordination mechanisms, at the scale of the street, the suburb, and the city, that change the incentive structure for everyone simultaneously. The target is the system, not the individual.
Community over platform
Online tools alone cannot create the conditions for sustained behaviour change. GoZero Teams are deliberately designed around the criteria that evidence shows are necessary for complex social change to take hold: small, locally embedded groups with overlapping relationships, regular in-person contact, and mutual accountability.
Democratic legitimacy
GoZero creates the infrastructure that makes genuine community advocacy possible. The ongoing deliberation within GoZero Teams - mapping risks, sharing knowledge, developing collective positions - functions as a continuous citizens' assembly at the neighbourhood level: community members setting the agenda and owning the conclusions. When teams engage directly with local decision-makers, they bring the legitimacy of real deliberation behind them. GoZero holds the space in which that democratic process can develop.
Equity by design
Sufficiency does not require capital to unlock. Unlike electrification programmes that are structurally unavailable to those without savings or home ownership, sufficiency practices are accessible to renters, lower-income households, and the communities that most need relief from cost of living pressure. GoZero's model is designed to work for everyone, not just those already well-placed to benefit.
Our Values
Integrity
We will do what is right, even when it is not easy. Our commitment to transparency, accountability and governance, notably in how we measure progress, is the foundation of trust that we build with our members, communities, businesses and partners.
Independence
Independence allows us to make decisions that prioritise the needs of our planet and our communities. We are data-informed and are not beholden to any political agenda or industry. Our independence allows us to be nimble and proactive to changing circumstances, and to operate guided by ethics, fairness and equality.
Collaboration
Real change starts when we come together. We believe that all actors engaged in creating positive change towards systems with people and planet at their heart, are our friends and allies. Creating a secure, resilient, sufficient future is only possible by building a community of people and organisations with shared goals and aligned interests, and fostering cooperation and participation among its members. We want you to join us to create this future, together.