Projects — North Star Transition

North Star Transition projects

The past twenty years are evidence that narrow-focused silo approaches to dealing with systemic challenges do not work. All our systems are interconnected: energy, food, finance, transport, and so on. All interplay and retroact together.

Systems change is often discussed and theorised, but it seems difficult to realise.

North Star Transition puts systems change in motion in pragmatic and effective ways. We aim to accelerate systems change because we now know that the entire working of our systems need to be reconfigured to enable life to thrive, and to minimise the forthcoming disruptions due to climate heating, soil degradation, energy, water and raw materials depletion.

Wales Transition Lab

A systemic nation-scale programme across Wales that reconnects food, health and nature in order to deliver beneficial solutions that address the root causes of wellbeing decline. Started in October 2020, Wales Transition Lab brings together over 50 Welsh leaders across food, farming, environment, water, business, education and health sectors.

Interested in shaping the future of food, health and nature at nation-scale across Wales? Get in touch.

Scotland Transition Lab

In our bid to explore a world that is regenerative rather than degenerative, North Star Transition has launched Scotland Transition Lab, in collaboration with the Global Soil Health Programme at the University of Glasgow. Taking inspiration from our successful Wales Transition Lab model, this is an initiative that brings together leaders, researchers and practitioners with the foresight and creativity to explore the possibilities that lie beyond the silos of organisational and sectoral boundaries. We are driving an ambitious and engaging set of shared goals for Scotland around which we can collaboratively build conversations, strategies, and innovation.

Wye-Usk Transition Lab

Building on the work of our Wales Transition Lab model, we asked the question: can we apply our Transition Lab thinking to transform a landscape? The landscape that the stakeholders in Wales Transition Lab recommended was the catchments of the Wye and Usk rivers - some of the UK’s most beautiful yet polluted landscapes. Wye-Usk Transition Lab brings together stakeholders on the ground who need to see the landscape transformed, with the resources needed to carry out those ambitious transformations.

Regenerative Investment Lab

Current corporate governance laws, models and practices support degenerative outcomes for the planet, even while we face huge adaptation challenges. Yet, the ambitions for shifting the norms of strategy and corporate governance seem focused on incremental change, based on yesterday’s benchmarks.

We seek to shift the focus to what management, strategy and governance should look like to achieve a regenerative system.

Get in touch to find out more.

Knowledge Lab

So many of our leaders and system participants do not have the tools they need to deal with the many crises we are currently facing. Through North Star Transition’s Knowledge Lab we seek to provide everyone with the tools and the knowledge needed to find solutions and face crises head on.

By educating people, we want to make everyone agents of change so that solutions can be imagined and rolled out at scale throughout a network of system participants. Of course, this is not theoretical - we are bringing the transformative lessons and processes learned through the work of our Transition Labs.

Other noteworthy North Star Transition projects:

Wales Net Zero 2035 Action Group

The action group is chaired by Jane Davidson and is looking for the most imaginative approaches to inform deliverable plans for the Welsh Government that will help it achieve Net Zero. We are seeking views from Wales and across the world, and making our draft conclusions public, before making recommendations to Welsh Government in summer 2024. Jyoti Banerjee, our CEO, is a member of the Action Group, while team members Jo Jones, Dan Ward and Luke Penny are part of the group’s secretariat.

Check out the group’s website here.

Dreel Burn partnership, led by Fife Coast and Countryside Trust

The Dreel Burn Investment Readiness (DBIRP) partnership, funded by the Facility for Investment Ready Nature in Scotland (FIRNS) grant scheme, aims to restore the Dreel Burn, a river landscape in Fife. The project is highly collaborative, with co-design between interested parties being key to our core values of transparency and integrity. North Star Transition and Apella Advisors are supporting the work around financing of landscape transformation.

Dreel Burn project information

Mainstreaming Nature-based Solutions

This is a multi-year innovation project funded by OFWAT to encourage the mainstreaming of nature-based solutions. The project is led by United Utilities. North Star Transition is leading the workstream on financing nature-based solutions.

Project information

Food Strategy for Velindre Cancer Trust

What does a #FutureGen food strategy look like for an NHS Trust? North Star Transition supported Velindre’s development of a food strategy to help enable local, healthy, good quality and environmentally sustainable food, improving the wellbeing of patients, staff, food communities and supporting local food suppliers/producers.

Food procurement for Bridgend schools

Welsh Government's Backing Local Firms Fund invited North Star Transition to draw on its experience in working on localising food sourcing for NHS Wales hospitals to propose how the lessons from such work could be applied to food sourcing for Welsh schools and local authority care homes. Bringing together that learning to give a more holistic view of cross public sector food sourcing. Bridgend County Council worked with North Star Transition, using Bridgend as a lens to focus and ground the thinking, and develop learning and actions that can be applied across the public sector food system.

Urban Green Accreditation - Natural England

Natural England invited North Star Transition to explore the potential role that private sector investors might play in the UK Government’s response to the Landscapes Review. Our focus was on a possible national urban greening investment framework.

Reservoir and landscape systems in the Fens

The South Lincolnshire Reservoir (SLR) and Fens Reservoir (FR) are two major pieces of new infrastructure proposed for the Anglian Region under the Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development (RAPID) gated process. Mott MacDonald and North Star Transition were invited to review the potential for further investment in the landscapes around the reservoirs, outside of the Development Consent Order (DCO) process, to create additional benefits that would be enabled by the creation of the reservoirs.

View the report here.

Putting our ideas to work