Explore answers to some of the commonly asked questions about us, what we do and how we do it.
If you have any further inquiries beyond what is listed below, do not hesitate to reach out to us!
Anthropogenic are the human behavioural drivers of the ecological crises we face in the world e.g. pollution or environmental change caused or influenced directly or indirectly by human activity.
Overshoot refers to the human consumption of natural resources at rates faster than they can be replenished, and entropic waste production over and above the Earth’s assimilative and processing capacity. Overshoot is a symptom of a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behaviour, and is framed as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and recognized as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot.
Ecological overshoot refers to the unprecedented number of existential threats faced by humans and other species due to anthropogenic impacts exceeding our planet’s boundaries (i.e. climate change, dangerous territory with instability in the known realms of biosphere integrity, land system changes and novel entities like plastics and synthetic toxins, freshwater change, and biogeochemical flows). All of these threats are symptoms of anthropogenic ecological overshoot and pose an increasingly catastrophic risk to all complex life on Earth, given the dynamic closed and interconnected nature of Earth’s systems.
We recognize that the climate change issue is sown in neglect and ignorance but reaped in devastation. Its intractable, hidden, and inextricably linked complexities are evident across key sectors of our economy, and there’s no single solution to addressing the many ecological challenges created by climate change effects. But as it is with the range of colours produced when light passes through a glass prism, Spectrum positions itself as the lens through which the broad range of interrelated climate issues are filtered, packaged and prioritised to be addressed through high-impact and targeted catalytic interventions.
Success: As a member of the Kenya National Taskforce on Climate-Health, supported the development of the first-ever Kenya Climate Change and Health Strategy 2023-2027, setting the pace for the rest of Africa in defining the right taxonomies and pathways for the regional Climate Health agenda.
Ongoing: We are orchestrating catalytic progress in climate action by demonstrating how current interventions are largely physical, resource-intensive, slow-moving, and focused on addressing the symptoms of ecological overshoot (like climate change) rather than the distal cause (maladaptive human behaviours).
As an independent problem-solver, we are dot-connecting across researchers, government, industry, and communities to identify and resolve the highest-priority bottlenecks or risks through a health-centric and nature-positive lens. We argue that even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress.
Our current areas of focus include: –
Our 15 years of experience in Market-shaping interventions in global health provide a powerful lesson in our efforts to model for the struggle to decarbonize healthcare and other key sectors of the economy and attain climate resilience. Our efforts in global public health, medicines access and markets have shown that some promising but nascent fields (e.g. Climate Change and Health) can get caught up in market distortions or bottlenecks (e.g. the “chicken and egg” dynamic in which buyers wait until costs come down with scale, but manufacturers won’t scale up production without guaranteed buyer demand). We believe interventions or solution builders and market shapers can collaborate to unstick these bottlenecks, helping the nascent climate health market overcome its initial distortions and challenges.
We help existing and new transdisciplinary fields and approaches to develop in a more health-centric, high-rigor, science-first, and catalytic way: