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 build community resilience and wellbeing through sufficiency

We work to address the root cause of ecological collapse and the cost-of-living crisis: extractivism and overconsumption. We do this by promoting the adoption of sufficiency-first approaches at the household, community, business and governmental levels. GoZero was originally focused on reducing emissions to zero, but we now work to reduce extractivism, overconsumption and the overshoot of all planetary boundaries to zero, not just emissions.

 

What Is Extractivism?

Extractivism is a form of excessive extraction that privatises gains for a minority while socialising costs, particularly when this activity exceeds planetary and social boundaries. It prioritises short-term financial gains at the expense of social and ecological well-being.

Artificial intelligence infrastructure is turbo-charging extractivism across every domain at once — of human knowledge and culture, of materials, of water, and of energy, at a scale already pushing major technology companies to walk back the climate commitments they made before the AI boom. The gains concentrate; the costs are shared by everyone else.

 

Our Structure

Two organisations, one shared mission

GoZero and the GoZero Foundation are independent organisations that work together to deliver the shared vision and mission above. GoZero supports its business network with its GoZero's Rewards system and resilience services. The GoZero Foundation, which is a registered charitable trust, coordinates the household and community sufficiency and resilience work.

 

Diagnosing Our Predicament

Addressing the cause of the cost-of-living crisis

Across New Zealand, more people are finding it harder to afford the essentials — food, energy, water, housing, insurance and rates. The systems that supply these essentials are under increasing strain from ecological breakdown. Rising insurance premiums, higher food prices, costlier infrastructure repairs: these are what ecological breakdown looks like when it reaches everyday life. The economic assumptions underlying long-term planning — retirement savings, investment, property — were built for a stable climate and stable resource costs. Both are now in question.

GoZero has analysed how extractivism, overconsumption, the overshoot of planetary boundaries and other factors are contributing to increasing the cost of living and other crises in New Zealand.

 

Our Response

Sufficiency First

The protection of households' and communities' wellbeing requires the protection of the life-support system upon which our economy and society depend. The dominant response has been to rely on market-based and technological solutions that do not address extractivism, and in some cases make it worse. These solutions address the symptoms rather than the root causes of the crises we face.

To address extractivism and overconsumption requires extracting and consuming less. We can do this by design, using sufficiency, or by disaster, when systems collapse.

Sufficiency isn't about going without. It's about securing the essentials that provide genuine wellbeing — and reducing dependency on the complex, expensive, ecologically costly systems that are becoming less reliable. The goal is to live better, by living lighter: substituting local capacity and community resilience for fragile supply chains and volatile resource costs.

GoZero is launching initiatives to operate at four levels where this matters: households, communities, local economies and at the systems level.

 

Start Here

See what your household could save

The Sufficiency Savings Tool is free and takes about five minutes. It shows where your household's biggest opportunities are — from insurance to food to transport — and what a Resilience Fund built from those savings could look like.

 

Join A Team

Build a shared response, together

Want to build a shared response to the cost of living crisis and ecological breakdown with people in your own community? GoZero Teams bring together neighbours, colleagues and friends to practise sufficiency together and build local resilience.

 

Stay in the loop

Sign up to our mailing list to receive GoZero's updates on sufficiency, community resilience, local teams, businesses you can support, and what you can do to help transform our systems.

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