Contesting the future
Building resilient, hope-filled places through distributed power and capital
William Gibson's novel The Peripheral imagines a not-too-distant future defined not by a single catastrophe but by what characters call the Jackpot: decades of overlapping crises - pandemics, resource conflicts, economic collapse, environmental breakdown - arriving in combination, no single event sufficient to explain what happened, the accumulation doing what no individual crisis could.
I have been thinking about the Jackpot a lot recently.
Watching the news one can’t help but feel like Gibson was onto something. Proliferating armed conflicts, shocks to energy and supply chains, the slow erosion of the post-war international order, a domestic economy in which only 14% of Britons expect the next generation to be better off. Against that backdrop, a study published last week found that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the ocean current system responsible for Britain's relatively mild climate, is now projected to weaken significantly faster than previous models estimated.
A 51% weakening of the AMOC would bring much harsher conditions to the UK by the end of the century (we often forget we sit at the same latitude as Canada), as well as disrupted monsoons affecting hundreds of millions in West Africa and South Asia, and accelerating sea level rise along coastlines from New York to Norfolk. The researchers behind the study corrected for systematic errors that had caused earlier models to underestimate the process.
The AMOC story was briefly covered in the media but struggled to cut through a news environment saturated with crises that are more immediate and tangible. Slow-moving catastrophes compete badly against fast-moving drama and rage-bait.
This reality of competing pressures on institutional behaviours is reflected in our own research, published in the State of Procurement 2026 report with Bloom. When identifying the priorities which inform commissioning decisions in ‘ideal’ and ‘real world’ scenarios, 12% of public procurement professionals named climate action as a top consideration in ideal scenarios (modest even as an aspiration). Under real budget conditions that figure falls to zero. The driver is straightforward enough: when public finances tighten, balancing the budget becomes the overriding logic, with ‘delivering cashable savings’ surging from 6% to 28% as the top procurement priority between ideal and real-world scenarios.
‘Too big to solve’
I think the language of climate action is a key problem. Terms like Net Zero and climate change describe a challenge so vast and so slow-moving that the rational response for most people is to file it under Important But Not Today, or worse, Too Big to Solve. This impression of abstract inevitability has fuelled a political revolt against taking any action on climate, the case for which is increasingly framed as a sacrifice British businesses and households should make to honour a global commitment, shouldering costs that competitors elsewhere are not, and constraining ourselves in the service of an abstract public good or penance for the sins of our industrial heritage.
Environmental arguments, it turns out, are not the most compelling case for action on climate — geopolitical instability is. The fragility of energy supply chains, the cost of depending on distant and unreliable sources, the exposure of local economies to global shocks: these are making the argument that abstract environmental language never quite could. The narratives cutting through are grounded ones: lower bills, predictable costs, warm homes, jobs in industries with a future. An outcomes-centred story describes what action actually delivers, and makes it feel achievable in a way that systems-level language does not.
Private action for public benefit
This deeply grounded approach is already having successes. Sheffield City Council's Climate Investment, structured through Abundance Investment and available to anyone from as little as £5, closed its first phase ahead of schedule in January, raising its full £1 million target before the deadline. The proposition was specific: your money, your city, solar on schools, home energy upgrades, visible and verifiable. That is one expression of something larger. Abundance has financed over £140 million in local green investment since 2012. The UK Government’s Social Impact Investment Advisory Group, reporting last November, identified £10.6 billion in impact capital already aligned to climate goals in the UK alone, within a global impact capital pool estimated at over $2 trillion USD.
While political momentum around climate action has been waning, the pool of purpose-driven impact capital is growing and hungry for pipeline. Impact investors are not waiting to be persuaded of the case for climate action. They are looking for cities and regions that can present well-structured, credible propositions: defined outcomes, credible pipelines, the financial literacy and programming discipline that institutional partners require.
This is where place leaders, especially at city and regional level, have an opportunity that national politics currently cannot offer. Across the UK there is a yearning for a new, hopeful story about where we are headed and how we get there. This is visible in everything from community energy schemes to local investment platforms to the growth of purpose-driven businesses. What looks like emergence is really a renaissance: the habits of private action for public benefit that built Britain's civic infrastructure, reasserting themselves after a long period in which the state was assumed to be the natural vehicle for collective ambition. Public sector leaders who are willing to share power, engage that energy and build purposeful partnerships with private and third sector actors can do something that neither market forces nor central government can do alone: make the graspable case for mitigation, adaptation and resilience in the places where people actually live.
The jackpot and the junction box
The Jackpot, in Gibson's telling, rewarded the agile and the well-resourced. Place leaders - sitting at the junction of public authority, private capital and civic energy - can be both of those things if they chose to be. The distributed creative and financial assets of their regions are already in motion. Leaders with the courage to meet that energy, and the humility to amplify rather than direct it, are not just contesting the future offered by those with deep pockets and narrow interests. They are building a better one.
Ready to Take action?
Sam Markey is Managing Director of Recurve and will be speaking at the Smart Cities World Summit on Wednesday 24 June in London, chairing a discussion on building investable climate pipelines and speaking on procurement as a tool for urban resilience.