Members of the editorial team for this special edition have been engaging in an ongoing dialogue with the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) around the dominant decision support and decision-making orthodoxy for the net zero transformation since 2020. It was and has become increasingly evident that the realization of Net Zero by 2050 will require the ability for strategy developers, operational planners and decision makers to better manage uncertainty, complexity and emergence (Clean Air Task Force, unpublished)1. It is also becoming ever apparent that the application of the conventional orthodox set of decision support tools and processes that have been used to explore deep decarbonisation options to 2050 have obscured decision makers from the enormity of the uncertainty, complexity and emergence which occupies the net zero decision space (Pye et al., 2021). Tools have often been used which are inappropriate (Gambhir et al., 2019; van Dorsser et al., 2020). This lack of competency has been glaringly revealed during the C-19 Pandemic which had uncertainty characteristics similar to climate change and net zero albeit more immediate impacts.