Volume 10, Issue 3

Summer 2019, Volume 10, Issue 3

For a sustainable and desirable future

Solutions Collective Impact for Climate Mitigation

by R. Bruce Hull and Rich Dooley

Seeding Change

by Visioning Good Anthropocenes

by Laura M. Pereira, et al.

Climate Consciousness: Artist Kito Mbiango on the Power of Art to Drive Action on Climate Change

by Jill Van den Brule Nature-Based Solutions for Coping with Disaster and Climate Change Risks

by Radhika Murti and Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel

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Reconciling Ecosystem Services with Economic Theory and Policy

by Thomas Tunstall

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Caniglia, B. (2019). Letter from the Editor. Solutions 10(3): 1. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/letter-from-the-editor

Letter from the Editor by Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Ph.D.

T

he process of finalizing this issue of Solutions has been fraught with the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

When I began drafting this letter, my home city of New Orleans was flooding.

Six inches of rain fell in just one hour, and the street in front of our house was like a rolling river filled with trash and debris. At the same time, forecasts were heating up over where Hurricane Barry would hit. This being my first hurricane as a New Orleans resident, I was glued to the television and on-line reports, examining spaghetti models and impact cones. Should we evacuate?

If yesterday’s six inches flooded the city, what would it be like to get twenty-four inches? And for the first time, we had to worry about the Mississippi River breaching her banks. My personal stress level was off-the-charts; I couldn’t really think of anything other than the storm.

One woman in my office said her entire family was going to Pensacola, but she couldn’t afford to evacuate. The unequal impacts of extreme weather events really hit home that day! Eventually, my husband Jason and I decided to get a room at a hotel that had a generator and accepted pets. We bought groceries, and hunkered down for days watching the storm with our dogs at the hotel.

Around the world, similar high stress events have occurred. The World Meteorological Organization officially named July 2019 as the hottest July on record, just after it had named June 2019 the hottest June on record.

Approximately 1/3 of the United States has been under heat advisories, while Europe in general and France and Germany in particular have struggled with intense heat. Australia, South America, The Arctic, and Alaska all experienced record temperatures this summer, melting permafrost and glaciers at rates in some cases almost 100 times faster than previously predicted by climate models. Heat wasn’t the only extreme we faced as a planet. May

of 2019 was recorded as the 2nd wettest May on record and solidified the period between May 2018 and May 2019 as the wettest twelve months recorded by the National Centers for Environmental Information at NOAA. By February of 2019, nearly forty extreme weather records were broken around the world.

More than ever, we need solutions; and we need solutions that can break through the political and economic stalemates that keep us trapped pursuing ways to perpetuate the status quo.

This issue of Solutions is dedicated to highlighting some of the tools being used to penetrate inertia and bring about significant changes in our approaches to sustainability. Data shows that scientific evidence is not enough to motivate changes in policies and behavior. Alternative technologies and mental models are needed. We highlight a number of interesting examples of each of these here.

I am thrilled to draw your attention to the powerful artwork of Kito Mbiango, which is featured on the cover of this issue and is the subject of a photo exposé that elaborates Kito’s vision for the way art can break through the barriers that hold us back from the changes needed to address climate change. The cover, along with the other images featured in Jill Van den Brule’s exposé are from Kito’s Climate Change Collection.

The images have enthralled me since I encountered them. I hope you will ponder their messages, wonder at their foreboding compositions, and become more open to recognizing our interdependencies with the natural world through his work. Artists like Kito are essential players in the creation of alternative visions of the future and alternative narratives to frame human relations with the natural world. They also help us to recharge our commitments to our activist, scholarly, business, and policy work focused

The Solutions Journal Editor-in-Chief, Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Ph.D.

on creating shared prosperity on a healthy planet, because sitting with the truth of images like Kito’s deeply connects us to the personal truths that drive us in our sustainability work.

Finally, please join me in welcoming Dr. Mairi-Jane Fox as our new Media Section Editor and Business Editor. Fox is a relentless advocate for the impact businesses can have on the road to sustainability, having served inside of oil & gas, mining, and finance organizations on social and environmental responsibility initiatives. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Finance & Economics and Director of the Sustainable Economic & Enterprise Development Institute at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.

As always, thank you for being part of our Solutions family. We invite you to get more deeply involved by submitting your work, becoming a sponsor, following us on social media or volunteering your time and talents to our efforts.

In deep solidarity.

www.thesolutionsjournal.com | Summer 2019 | Solutions | 1

Contents

Summer 2019

Features

The search for real answers begins with Solutions Join the Solutions Team Become a part of the global Solutions team. Applications are invited for volunteer section editors. Have Solutions delivered to your door or devices with our PDF subscription. Keep up to date on our latest articles and gain exclusive access to online and face to face Solutions events.

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Collective Impact for Climate Mitigation

36

Seeding Change by Visioning Good Anthropocenes

Submit your thoughts, data, and innovations in the form of articles, news stories, features, or online comments. Follow us and shout out on Twitter @SolutionsMag on Facebook @SolutionsJournal and on Instagram @Solutions.Journal.

What are your #solutions?

Your contribution is essential to our work!

Click on our website ads or give a tax-deductible gift at www.thesolutionsjournal.com.

Climate change is a wicked challenge because it requiring diverse stakeholders with different agendas to collaborate, innovate, and change business as usual. The Collective Impact method provides a set of best practices for coordinating such efforts. This article describes its application to reduce a community’s emissions by 75 percent and make its energy system more secure, reliable, and affordable.

by Laura M. Pereira, Elena Bennett, Reinette Biggs, Astrid Mangnus, Albert V. Norström, Garry Peterson, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, My Sellberg, and Joost Vervoort

The advent of the Anthropocene—a new era in which humans are the dominant force of change on the Earth—comes with a plethora of dystopian narratives of where we are going as a species on the planet. We argue that creativity and new ways of thinking and doing are critical to fostering new trajectories human-environment relationships, but that this requires us to generate new, positive and inspiring stories and visions of the future. In this project, we use seeds—innovations and experiments at the margins—as a source of inspiration to co-produce radically alternative, novel and positive future visions for the Earth and humanity.

Join the Dialogue

Become a Partner

by R. Bruce Hull and Rich Dooley

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Climate Consciousness— Artist Kito Mbiango on the Power of Art to Drive Action on Climate Change

by Jill Van den Brule

Belgian-Congolese artist Kito Mbiango shares his thinking and inspiration behind his “Climate Change Collection” and how he is using the power of art to drive action on climate change.

On the Web

Perspectives Nature-Based Solutions for Coping with Disaster and Climate Change Risks—An Approach that Needs to be Rooted in Social Learning by Radhika Murti and Sarah-Lan Mathez-

Stiefel Nature based solutions to societal challenges employs natural resource management and biodiversity conservation actions for the simultaneous benefits of human-wellbeing and biodiversity well-being but need joint approaches for implementation. This can be achieved through social learning. 16

www.thesolutionsjournal.com Explore the Solutions website for more content and interactivity. What are your solutions? Share your vision for a sustainable and desirable future and learn more about the Solutions community.

Envisioning

Reconciling Ecosystem Services with Economic Theory and Policy by Thomas Tunstall Neoclassical economic theory, which has

come to dominate much of the policymaking world, reduces the factors of production to labor and capital. The link between land—or more generally natural capital and ecosystem services - with the economy has effectively been severed by neoclassical economic thought. In that aftermath, both policymakers and academics understandably struggle to synthesize economic theory and the environmental sink in a systematic fashion. 21

07 On the Ground

Reckoning GDP by Counting Chemical Bond Exchanges by John E. Coulter

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Games For Sustainable Development Goals Namibia: Towards Youth Engagement In Achieving Sustainability

by Reinhold Mangundu and Justine Braby Around the world, simulation gaming as tools for problem solving is slowly gaining momentum. There is a lot of research that shows that simple interactive games can help us better understand systems, anticipate emerging complex phenomena, and help us to build. The games for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) enable us to study complex challenges and think ‘outside the box’.

Money seems real because of what it can buy, but it fails as a measure of work done. Work can be traced to where the breaking of a diatomic oxygen molecule combines with a carbon atom resulting in a trade of about 2 percent of the force between proton-electron pairs within the set of atoms involved. This force can achieve a lift against gravity which is a handy shorthand for measuring economic activity, even up to Gross Domestic Product.

Idea Lab Noteworthy

06 In Review

The End of Pesticides

by Steve Marriot A new and quite remarkable technology that has taken 16 years of research and several million dollars of our own funding.

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Show Up Hard: A Road Map for Helpers in Crisis

Reviewed by Olivia G. Ford “What if your job is not to be right or knowledgeable,” social entrepreneur Shannon Weber, MSW, asks readers; “What if your role is to create change?” Weber guides readers on an interactive journey to build their capacity to “Show Up Hard”: to lead mindfully and support others sustainably, at the intersection of empathy and resilience.

Designing Regenerative Cultures Reviewed by David W. Orr

Editorial Letter from the Editor

by Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Ph.D.

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Reprinted with permission from Designing Regenerative Cultures, by Daniel Christian Wahl, 2016, Triarchy Press, Axminster.

A Concerned Citizen: Civics in Action. Bo Boudart Producer and Director. Bullfrogfilms.com (2019)

Reviewed by Tim DeChristopher Tim DeChristopher reviews the new documentary, A Concerned Citizen, about the work of activist Riki Ott. www.thesolutionsjournal.com | Summer 2019 | Solutions | 3

The Solutions Journal Editor-in-Chief: Beth Schaefer Caniglia Associate Editors: Robert Costanza Hunter Lovins Ida Kubiszewski David W. Orr History Section Editor: Frank Zelko Book & Envisioning Editor: Bruce Cooperstein Media Reviews Section & Sustainable Business Editor: Mairi-Jane Fox Print Graphic Designer: Kelley Dodd On-Line Layout Design: Koen Dekeyser Editorial Board Gar Alperovitz, Vinya Ariyaratne, Robert Ayres, Peter Barnes, Bill Becker, Paulette Blanchard, Lester Brown, Alexander Chikunov, Raymond Cole, Rita Colwell, Bob Corell, Herman Daly, Thomas Dietz, Josh Farley, Lorenzo Fioramonti, Jerry Franklin, Susan Joy Hassol, Richard Heinberg, Jeffrey Hollender, Buzz Holling, Terry Irwin, Jon Isham, Wes Jackson, Tim Kasser, Frances Moore Lappe, Rik Leemans, Wenhua Li, Tom Lovejoy, Manfred Max-Neef, Peter May, Jacqueline McGlade, Bill McKibben, William Mitsch, Mohan Munasinghe, Norman Myers, Shar Olivier, Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir, Bill Rees, Wolfgang Sachs, Ken Sagendorf, Peter Senge, Rebecca Sheehan, Vandana Shiva, Anthony Simon, Gus Speth, Larry Susskind, David Suzuki, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Alvaro Umaña, Sim van der Ryn, Peter Victor, Mathis Wackernagel, Eugene Wilkerson, Mike Young In Memoriam Ray Anderson Ernest Callenbach Elinor Ostrom Subscriptions http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/subscribe Email: solutions@thesolutionsjournal.com Sponsorships & Partnerships http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/sponsor Email: solutions@thesolutionsjournal.com

On the Cover

The cover image is a work by Kito Mbiango titled Climate Change Collection #16.

Contributors 2

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1. Steve Marriot—Born in Far East to

English parents, both died when I was 4yrs old. Raised by the Chinese cleaning lady. 40 years research, previous world coverage for overcoming Osmosis effect on fish and raising salt water species in freshwater making it possible for Cod etc to be reared near land locked major cities thus protecting natural stocks and significantly reducing transport costs. Motivation…

Forget Global Warming, it’s too late, let’s develop the technology to survive it.

2. John E Coulter—Dr Coulter has

made extensive practical and policy contributions in resource management in China, Indonesia and Australia. He has successfully completed more than twenty projects for China State Council, various Chinese Ministries, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. He has successes in linking Material Flow Analysis to Economic Cost-Benefit Analysis.

3. Radhika Murti—Dr. Radhika

Murti is the Director, Global Ecosystem Management Programme of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Her research interest is exploring the role of social learning for transdisciplinary research and collaborations for sustainability 4. Sarah-Lan Mathez—Dr.

Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel is a Senior Research Scientist with the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) at the University of Bern. She focuses on transdisciplinary research for sustainable natural resource management and sustainable development, especially in mountain ecosystems.

5. Thomas Tunstall—Thomas

Tunstall, Ph.D. is the senior research director at the University of Texas at San Antonio Institute for Economic Development. His research has led him to write a novel about the systemic disconnect between economics and ecosystems entitled “The Entropy Model” 4 | Solutions | Summer 2019 | www.thesolutionsjournal.com

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available on Amazon. Dr. Tunstall holds a Ph.D. in Political Economy, and an M.B.A. from the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as a B.B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin.

6. R. Bruce Hull—Hull is a Senior

Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability, which provides professional development and graduate education opportunities for sustainability professionals working at the intersection of business, government, and civil society.

He advises organizations, communities, and professionals wanting leadership tools to help them respond to challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene.

7. Rich Dooley—Dooley is Arlington

County’s Community Energy Coordinator on the Rethink Energy (AIRE) team in the Office of Sustainability and Environmental Management. Mr. Dooley ensures that all stakeholders’ voices are heard when it comes to shaping Arlington County’s energy future, and that the County’s award-winning Community Energy Plan and companion Community Energy Plan Implementation Framework will help: 1) provide reliable and affordable energy, 2) ensure Arlington’s economic competitiveness, and 3) protect the environment.

8. Laura M. Pereira—Pereira is

a research fellow at the Centre for Food Policy working on governance for food system transformation in South Africa. She also has an extraordinary appointment as a senior researcher at the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition at Stellenbosch University, and is a research associate at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Laura is a member of the IPBES expert group on scenarios and models where she has been able to use the methodology from the seeds project to help develop the Nature Futures Framework that will

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hopefully form the basis for more positive visions of nature and biodiversity.

9. Elena Bennett—Bennett is

Associate Professor of Sustainability Science at McGill University, where she works on science to improve management of ecosystem services in working landscapes. Her research focuses on the provision of multiple ecosystem services in working landscapes across multiple scales. She is also the co-chair of ecoSERVICES. 10. Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs—Biggs

holds a DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Social-Ecological Systems and Resilience at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She is based in the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, a transdisciplinary flagship research centre at Stellenbosch University and is also affiliated with the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden. She serves on the South African Global Change Science Committee, the Board of Directors of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in Sweden, co-chairs the Science Committee of the international Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS), and leads the Southern African Program on Ecosystem Change and Society (SAPECS). (Not pictured) 11. Astrid Mangnus—Mangnus

is a PhD candidate at the Copernicus Institute and the Urban Futures Studio at Utrecht University. Her research project applies various futures methods, ranging from scenario-making to simulation gaming, in urban cases in Japan, Europe and global city networks. The results can point out new pathways for the governance of urban sustainability transformations.

12. Albert V. Norström—Norström is

deputy director of the GRAID programme, at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. His research focuses on social-ecological dynamics of ecosystem services, and on

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exploring and developing positive visions of futures that are socially and ecologically desirable, just, and sustainable.

13. Garry Peterson—Peterson is

professor in environmental sciences with emphasis on resilience and socialecological systems at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.

His research combines three themes: abrupt systemic change, how ecological changes impacts people, and using futures thinking to improve navigating surprising social-ecological change. He is head of subject for the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s Sustainability Science PhD programme.

14. Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne—Dr.

Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne is based at Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and explores the distribution of and values associated with biodiversity and ecosystem services across landscapes.

Over the past decade, Ciara has led the development of tools and methods to link science to the needs of decisionmakers, with products that include an ecosystem services Toolkit for the Canadian government, and a mechanism for Technical and Scientific Cooperation for parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Much of the work that Ciara has engaged in was inspired by gaps identified in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, for which Ciara served as the coordinator of the Subglobal Assessment Working Group.

15. My Sellberg—Sellberg has a PhD

in Sustainability Science with a focus on applying social-ecological resilience thinking in strategic planning at the local and regional level. My adopts a transdisciplinary approach in her research with experience of leading several projects of co-designing and co-producing knowledge with non-academic partners in Sweden, specifically in the area of sustainable food systems. During her PhD, she led a

project of developing a vision for sustainable food systems in the Stockholm region with diverse stakeholders and an interdisciplinary research team.

Justice Worldwide, InPartnership, and the Sero Project; her work has appeared in Black AIDS Weekly, Positively Aware, POZ, Rewire, and other outlets.

16. Joost Vervoort—Dr. Joost

19. David Orr—Orr is Paul Sears

Vervoort is Assistant Professor of Foresight and Anticipatory Governance at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, and an Honorary Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. He has a leading role in the Earth System Governance network on the theme of anticipatory governance. Recently, Joost has developed a new research direction—research on simulation gaming as an approach to participatory futures—which has resulted in the awarding of a prestigious Vidi grant from the Dutch National Science Organization (NWO).

Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont

17. Jill Van den Brule—Van den Brule

is a humanitarian and social entrepreneur. She co-founded MPOWERD, a B Corps that makes the solar powered Luci lantern, providing clean, reliable light to all. She was part of UNICEF’s emergency response team in post-earthquake Haiti and has launched many global campaigns including with the UN Sustainable Development Goals Advocates. An educator and mentor, she taught a Masters class in human rights at Sciences Po in Paris. Van den Brule was named 40 over 40 by Forbes and one of the Top 50 Philanthropists by T&C in 2016 for her social justice work. (Not pictured) 18. Olivia G. Ford—Ford is a New

Orleans-based freelance editor and writer who has worked primarily in HIV-related media since 2007. She is a consulting editor with The Well Project, a past communications director at Positive Women’s Network - USA, and a former executive editor at TheBody, where she remains a contributing editor. She has consulted with groups such as Echoing Ida, HIV

20. Tim DeChristopher—

DeChristopher is a climate activist and a co-founder of the Climate Disobedience Center. After disrupting a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction in Utah in 2008, Tim served two years in federal prison. His story was featured in the film Bidder 70.

21. Reinhold Mangundu—Reinhold

is a Programme Officer at Progress Namibia, and is part of the core team.

He joined the team in 2016 for his in-service training at the Namibia University of Science and Technology.

His has an Honours in Regional and Rural Planning. Reinhold is now currently completing his Post Graduate Diploma in Sustainable Development and will pursue his Masters next year at the Stellenbosch University of South Africa.

22. Dr Justine Braby—Braby is the

Director of Progress Namibia, a company that leads work on supporting sustainable development in Africa (and globally) through various services, including capacity development, mentorships, facilitation, communication and education, and development planning, implementation and evaluation. Justine has extensive experience working on themes that are interconnected, such as climate change, sustainable land management, poverty eradication, among others. She has a large portfolio of work supporting African governments in their sustainable development planning, and has recently been working closely with the Sustainable Development Goals.

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Marriot, S. (2019). The End of Pesticides. Solutions 10(3): 6. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/the-end-of-pesticides

Idea Lab Noteworthy The End of Pesticides

by Steve Marriot

I

t has long been known that certain fish can detect the minute electromagnetic field (EMF) transmitted

by Algae in order to track their food source over several kilometers. On land, beetles and moths and other pests can detect a specific crop purely by identifying the individual EMF trace. Imagine then if it were possible to cloak the host from its predators by altering its EMF field and making it appear to be something else, effectively making it invisible to specifically evolved EMF tracking.

No need for pesticides or chemical protection.

Take it one step further and imagine being able to transmit the host EMF in an enhanced form to attract the pests to a given point and destroy them. Take a few minutes to expand on the principles of this new technology and you will see the endless possibilities. The potential of EMF cloaking technology is simply endless.

Not so simple of course . . . it is very complex with a host of variables and anomalies that require a lot more research. Simply transmitting an EMF field of a specific tree that has, for example, no interest to Locusts as a food source will not protect a corn crop. Everything is surrounded by a myriad of EMF fields but the predator can still isolate the specific trace EMF it is looking for. So how can cloaking work?

Obviously we need to play this very close to our chests for now. It has taken many years of research and a very large investment to achieve what we have done, but suffice it to say . . . . Cloaking IS possible. We have found a way via

The photo was taken by Kelly, the author's daughter

EMF (Elecro-Magnetic Field Technology). This latest break-through by Diobas has quite remarkable implications.

a complicated algorithm to change the waveform of an EMF signal into a more manageable form that can be manipulated via conventional sound editing equipment . . . then re-convert it back to an EMF trace having modified some key components. By adding or subtracting parts of the waveform we can effectively change the identity of the host. It is complex and involves far more than we are prepared to disclose for now, but the fact remains that EMF cloaking is not only possible, it is achievable.

Slowly over time it will be possible to build a comprehensive library of EMF traces, both natural and modified for use across a wide spectrum of applications. But there is much we still do not understand and there are certainly dangers attached.

Every new technology, especially when it comes to something as

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remarkable as EMF cloaking, can be used for destructive purposes as well as beneficial ones. Because EMF fields are so minute, the power to transmit them is incredibly small. A transmitter the size of an iPhone for instance could potentially alter the EMF trace across a very wide area of a given crop or species. Transmit a modified enhanced signal using our technology to attract rather than repel and it is conceivably possible to attract pests from a very wide area and destroy a crop. The economic consequences could be devastating.

Used correctly and responsibly EMF cloaking technology will provide one of the biggest technological advances in food production the world has seen for a very long time. EMF cloaking can provide tremendous advances in food production and the reduction in chemical pest control.

Coulter, J. E. (2019). Reckoning GDP by Counting Chemical Bond Exchanges. Solutions 10(3): 7-15. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/reckoning-gdp-by-counting-chemical-bond-exchanges

Envisioning

Reckoning GDP by Counting Chemical Bond Exchanges

In Brief

by John E. Coulter

I

n managing how the world should work, an influential article in Nature led with the statement that “Gross Domestic Product is a misleading measure of national success” and urged countries to “embrace new metrics”.1 As reported in this journal, there has indeed be a move by many countries and provinces to seek more realistic data on sustainability.2 A solution to identify key factors serving wellbeing is in the combining of science and economics to measure all activities by the changes in chemical bonds made.

From the simple act of breathing, up through the refining of metals, to complex manufacturing and what a whole country produces, the aggregate of oxygen-oxygen bonds exchanged for an oxygen-carbon bond is an insightful indicator of work done. As shown in the graphs leading this article, the poor performance in production in the US 2001-2010 can be identified objectively in science but was hidden in dollar-based National Accounts until after the crises of 2008.

The wealth of nations has been mused since the reign of Solomon.

Chests of gold and silos of grain were the early measures, and the advent of national accounting in the USA 80 years ago soon led to a movement within each country having buildings of staff working on their GDP. Leaders across the spectrum of polities hope to placate constituents with news of GDP growth even if not reflected in infrastructure and social fabric. GDP data shines even with and especially if reckless growth results in more pollution cleanups and increased health costs. Money management becomes

unhinged from the real goods and services that money is supposed to represent, and “making money” sinks into to “making-up money”.

Backlash in the form of a search for a new economic paradigm3 has led to attempts at Green GDP and the Genuine Progress Indicator. China published Green GDP data in 2006, embarrassing provincial leaders to the extent that it was not published in subsequent years, even though an army of public servants collect data and present a Green GDP Report which is not released.4 The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) can show what many people feel—that they are no better off in general wellbeing than twenty years ago, even though GDP would suggest otherwise. The GPI is now an official instrument for policy planning and management in some regional governments, and is proving a useful tool.5 However the basis for the index relies on surveys, interviews, and people’s perceptions, and not on the hard facts of financial records.

To tie financial accounting down to what is really happening, attempts are made to link to science. The First Law of Thermodynamics can be comprehended as the conservation of matter and energy. In practice a good representative of finite matter is gold.

Various attempts at linking a nation’s money to gold have been tried, most responsibly by Great Britain and then the USA, but no country has been willing to try in the last 50 years. Energy is a more malleable concept, yet said to be conserved (indestructible) and therefore applied as a measurement of economic activity. During the energy

Measuring production in money leads to the production of more money and less wellbeing across a country. Money is a moving measuring stick. An objective, science-based account of economic activity reveals major problems hidden in claims of GDP measured in dollars. Wealth and income are measured in money, but output, as contribution to a community, and subsequent worthiness and wellbeing, demand a more objective assessment. Managing financial systems inevitably leads to gaps between who does work and who benefits. Work is a real concept in economics and science. Dissatisfied with accounting in money terms, one avenue pursued to assess levels of economic activity is energy analysis. This paper takes steps back in science to address the physics of force and work and identifies the electromagnetic force stored in the chemical bonds of oxygen, triggered as available to do work by carbon bonding, as a useful universal metric for economic activity, serving as a backdrop to check GDP growth.

Calculating work done applies at any scale in any situation, from an individual climbing stairs to global GDP, all based on oxygen bonds gulped and broken.

Viewing capital as a history of embodied work done, a graph of purposive oxygen bonds broken on Earth 1750-2017 covers at a glance the sum of human endeavors. All human activity fits within that framework and zooming in on economic analysis at any scale forces acknowledgement of boundary constraints. Increased entropy has nowhere to hide.

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Envisioning crises of the 1970’s it was popular to look on manifestations of energy as a currency.

In the past half century there have been earnest studies to link economic activity to energy in some way. Odum’s “emergy”,6 Szargut’s exergy7 and Georgescu-Roegen’s entropy analysis8 all have intuitively potential insights into the science of economic production and consumption processes. This paper critically reviews the concept of energy and its relevance to the physics, chemistry and engineering that are the basis of primary and secondary industries.

Key Concepts • Dollar values assigned to economic activity, through ignorance or design, can be misleading. There is an objective, scientific currency that can serve as a check on money-based reports on how much a nation has produced.

• Human two-way relationships with surroundings, as individuals and groups, have multiple facets but often summarized in economics as production and income data that can be easily abused.

• Assessing income, for individuals and in national accounts, there is a way through material flow analysis to check reality.

“We Have No Knowledge of What Energy Is” Richard Feynman exclaimed that we do not know what energy is, adding, “we do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs”.9 And if the purer sciences need care with the concept, even more so in accounting for economic activity. Coal mining in England around 1750 provides an enlightening case study in energy economics before the term “energy” had been introduced. Coal mining is the provision of a resource formed by nature but requiring socio-economic inputs to extract and deliver. The phenomenon of “energy” resides both in the coal and in the work done on it. In Ricardo’s economics, in situ coal is “virgin land” and (especially if you do not know it is there) has no cost. A major cost in coal mining operations, however, is the vertical lift to the surface, not only of coal, but disposing of water threatening to flood the mine.

Before the term, “energy”, was coined

by Thomas Brown in 1804, James Watt had already popularized the notion of “horsepower” which he defined as 180 pounds lifted 181 feet in 1 minute (rounded to 33,000 foot pounds).

The idea of lifting 1 pound weight 1 foot high is elegant and practical,

• Managing complex flows of matter is an economic activity that can be reduced conceptually to the purposive release of just one form of energy.

• The charge extant between electron-proton pairs in oxygen and carbon atoms maneuvers into tighter arrangements during combustion and the bond count serves as an objective universal metric for human activity at any scale.

• Regardless of food, fodder or fossil fuel, it is the oxygen bond count in combustion that counts.

• The force released amounts to work, and today’s work done is tomorrow’s capital.

• The annual change in count of oxygen bonds broken serves as a useful backdrop for trying to explain and correct estimates of annual GDP growth.

set in the equation “work equals force times distance”, W =F x d, only enunciated in physics in 1829 by Coriolis. It should go without saying that force is the vertical force needed to overcome gravitational force. The “energy” term entered wider discussion with Joule’s experiments reported 1845 linking mechanical work to heat. The idea of

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convertibility, and of the conservation of energy (in some form) evolved into the field of Thermodynamics and the First and Second Laws, impacting on chemistry, electricity and public imagination.

Joule’s presentation of his results as “The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat” was an exciting advance, discrediting caloric theory, but also lent itself to future confusion. In hindsight a more precise naming on his discovery could have been, “The link between work done by gravitational force and the maximum heat that can be derived from that work”. That title is not as catching, but does not pretend any energy forms are “equivalent”. The force of gravity can be harnessed to churn water and raise its temperature, but warm water will not lift weights back up with the same efficiency.

Gravitational force is special. It is directional and constant, and though we have no idea of what it really is, for all practical purposes in everyday life, its source is the massiveness of planet Earth. Other forces—a push or pull, the force of wind, come from diverse sources of energy, and can manifest themselves in various forms. There is no universally agreed list of forms of energy, though most texts list about six groups which may overlap depending on user perspective. Discounting the force of gravity because it is free and the strong force inside nuclei, the only one force left to drive action (including economic activity) is the electromagnetic force (emf).10 If we return to Watt’s comparing of steam engines against horse power, a joule is lifting 102 grams one meter against the force of gravity. But the link to gravity was dropped in the 1946 world conference on measurements because, quite reasonably for scientific exactness, gravitational force varies by 0.7 percent between the extremes over the surface of the Earth.

Envisioning

The replacement definition requires us to imagine a mass of 1 kilogram with no gravitational forces acting on it experiencing some force that will accelerate it at 1 meter per second.

That is hard to imagine, in high school physics, and in professional economic research. The upshot is confusion in energy analysis of economic activities.

The energy concept gets only general treatment in economics, as if the details are taken care of in science.

Reference to the relationships water has with food, energy and environment11 has firmed into discussion of a “water-energy-food nexus”.12 The natural water cycle is now almost always augmented with construction of storage facilities and channeling and with pumping. That is, humans must intervene with energy investments, that can just be a dollar value, with the details left to engineers. Simply put, energy “inputs” are monetized and commodified.13 Yet big-picture accounting of physical economic activities provides a useful backdrop to dollar cost benefit analysis. It can identify misunderstandings in double counting,

counting line items that don’t belong and failure to count “externalities” which do count in the big picture.

Energy is not just another commodity, another input to an ecosystem and is not some single digit percentage of a country’s GDP. In science there is only matter and energy, and economics never counts “matter” as a generic input.

Economics needs to reverse engineer some ecological science and reassemble it in a new approach more useful to economic analysis. Energy in economics is more mysterious than rocket science. The scientists have left key problems unsolved. As a case in point, gasoline prices figure prominently in economic scenarios, and yet how science relates gasoline combustion to the environment seems unimportant in engineering and a mystery in economics.

Fueling the Economy— Chemistry’s Hidden Debt In chemistry, the reactants in gasoline combustion are accounted as having bond strengths totaling 16 kj/mol and the products as 21 kj/mol. The change

in enthalpy is -5 kj/mol and it is this negative number that consumers demand and countries go to war over.

Chemical engineers ignore the minus sign and convert this to Mj/liter, and then for a family car, 16 miles/gallon or 7 liters/100 km. The chemistry gives us the magnitude of the number accurately but hides what needs to be recognized for modelling in ecological economics. It does not make economic sense. If the energy units were dollars it would seem that the gasoline costs $16 and emissions $21 and as well allows $5 worth of energy is released, available for human use. From an economic sense it would be expected to start with a certain investment and portion be directed for beneficial use and, due to imperfect efficiency, the remainder emitted as waste. In chemistry the numbers seem the wrong way around. It just does not add up.

Over the past hundred years chemistry has established tests for the energy cost of separating the bonds that hold atoms in molecules. It is impossible to manually separate an individual bond between two atoms but practicable to do it between large

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Envisioning

Table 1. The combustion of gasoline shows the total bond energy of the product molecules is greater than that of the reactants, and the difference (taken as a positive quantity) is the amount of energy released and “available” for economic use.

batches (6 x 1023 molecules). The published results serve the purpose of showing that when a fuel combusts with oxygen, the difference in bond energies in resultant molecules is the amount of energy released and “available” for economic use (heating, driving a car, etc.). Table 1 summarizes this lab test.

An attempt is made here to venture between chemistry and economics to provide an explanation of the system at work. An atom is a structure unlike anything in macroscopic engineering, but obeying strict quantum mechanics laws. The rearrangement of valence electrons seeking tighter bonds in neighboring atoms occurs against a backdrop of the total energy in each atom. Chemistry text books refer to the “internal energy” by the symbol “U” and deem it unknowable. Given the complexity of the Schrodinger equation and acknowledging we cannot pin down electrons’ positions, it seems clear that there is no exact answer. This should not bother economists, and guessing internal total emf as the sum of bond strengths of valence electrons comes up with an estimate that can be improved on later.

See Pull-out Box 1 Where does bond strength come from? for this approach to understanding the relevance of bonding in the context of “total energy” in a single diatomic oxygen molecule.

Figure 1 displays the conventional approach and a new approach that recognizes what happens when energy is tapped from the overall ecosystem.

The conventional approach has been used for many decades because it gives the correct magnitude of energy released from a mole of gasoline (except it has a minus sign). The alternative approach provides a new and humbling understanding of the bigger picture. The energy made available is about 2 percent of the internal energy of the reactants, and once done the products are locked in tighter bonds where there is no more energy available.

This pattern is demonstrated using the chemistry lab situation of a mole of gasoline (octane, C8H18). But the pattern is the same when graphing just one molecule of octane, or a liter, ton or million barrels. Furthermore other hydrocarbons—methane, propane, exhibit the same pattern with the energy released being 2.1 percent of the internal energy (as calculated in the Supplementary Material). The energy released from coal is less because of impurities with the representative bituminous coal compound in the Supplementary Material calculated as 1 percent. The value for carbohydrates is 1.6 percent.

In general, for pure hydrocarbons the energy released is 1.5 percent of the internal energy (as estimated) of the oxygen combusted.

Carbon Exchange with Oxygen as Objective Measure of Economic Activity This approach, at any scale, serves as a model for the realistic appreciation of purposive release of energy

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in any economic activity. It answers Feynman’s cry for what that energy “is”. It is indeed the “little blobs” he sought, in the form of electron-proton pairs within atoms, that can rearrange combinations of atoms to save about 2 percent of their required internal structural maintenance forces.

The right hand half of Figure 1 is replicated in Figure 2 with the bond exchanges shown occurring as the reactants become products. In Figure 2 and its right hand half, the purposive act of extracting energy from the reactants can be shown in the exchange of bonds that results in the slightly tighter arrangement of products with the difference being what we perceive as the energy released. Only 2 percent of the energy internal to the reactants is made available for economic use. This is a humbling surprise for economic actors and for analysts of economic behavior. An explanation of the reaction in the center of Figure 2 is set out in Pull-out box 2.

Work as Lifting Against Gravity Rather than Joule’s comparison of weights falling with water temperature rising (and referring to their “equivalence”) the notion of lifting is a useful way of presenting economic activity. It is like lifting the stone blocks to make a huge pyramid, and the test can applied to how much you lifted today, in a year, or lifetime, and the same for companies, countries and the globe. The sobering realization is that all of human endeavor is an

Envisioning

Figure1. Calculating the energy released from 1 mole of gasoline in conventional chemistry and using an approach acknowledging where the energy is made available from.

aggregate of this. Financial calculations need to match the physical reality.

In the stark example of a forklift rated at 44 kw lifting a 4.488 ton item 1 meter high in 1 second, this is the result of 15 x 1021 molecules of C3H8 combusting with 75 x 1021 molecules of O2. In that 1 second each of 45 x 1021 carbon atoms trades up from its bond with hydrogen and locks in between two oxygen atoms. The swap results in a saving of about 6 electron volts (ev) in the required internal structural maintenance in each of the product molecules. That 6 ev, times 45 x 1021, is the energy released in all directions at the level of atoms that can be directed and harnessed in an engine cylinder to lift 4.488 tons 1 m high against the force of gravity (theoretically 44,000 joules or 2.7 x 1023 ev.). This calculation is for full throttle (1 gram propane per second) and empirical tests would present a lesser result.

Forklifts also transport items horizontally but if the combustion rate was the same as when lifting then the work done horizontally including against friction could be deemed

equivalent to a weight lift. All and any work done, based on calculation of oxygen molecule bonds broken and exchanged for oxygen-carbon bonds can be represented as an equivalent “lift against gravity”. A weightlifter may lift 50 kg 2 meters, and unlike the forklift, there is not direct instantaneous register of bond exchanges, but there is no doubt it does happen and there is an objective link between daily intake of carbon atoms (in carbohydrates and proteins) and work done, not only in lifting but all forms of work. It is observed that heat results from work done at the scale of atoms.

The solution this approach delivers is that it gives a closer picture of contributions to economic activity than GDP or income dollars. Speculation is a zero sum game and has zero net production. Stimulus packages do add to production, stirring economic activity where there was none. Millions of economic actors can sense that their oxygen intake, direct and indirect, results in work done. The more that that fact is considered, with its implications and the chain of indirect processes that combust, the clearer it

becomes. Even in tertiary industries with seemingly sedentary work, there are distant but vital links to physical activity that can be related to lifting work. This serves as an antidote, if not a solution to investment whisperers who portray that they can “make money” by paying high returns drawn from the investments latter hopefuls have made. Mere manipulation of money in such practices performed

by Madoff and such operators detailed in the documentary film “Inside Job” could not occur if required to show what work was done.

An all-perceiving alien sweeping by our planet 20,000 years ago would see the natural Earth with imperceptible human economic activity. Today a similar sweep would see pyramids and skyscraper cities, traffic clovers and large swathes of land radically transformed for better or worse by farming, deforestation, polluting, and in the past decade, proliferation of solar panels. A glance at the globe could be encapsuled in the sum of diatomic oxygen molecules broken since the start of the Industrial Revolution, 1750, up to 2017. The various engines

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Envisioning

Pull-Out Box No 1. Where Does Bond Strength Come From?

The figure below depicts an attempt to show the strength of the bond between two oxygen atoms (5.1 ev) against the backdrop of the overall internal energy of the two atoms. A single oxygen atom has 6 valence electrons and the emf structuring the electron in its relationship with its proton partner is assumed to be ionization energy, 13.6 ev. That would mean a certain internal energy of 81.6 ev. Single oxygen atoms are unstable and form diatomic oxygen allowing a saving of 5.1 ev so that the internal energy maintaining the structure of the molecule is now 158.1 ev.

Two oxygen atoms, each with 6 valence electrons maintaining a dynamic configuration find stabilization in a bonding that saves 5.1 ev from aggregate internal energy The diatomic oxygen molecule has a matrix of electron-proton pairs, that while fuzzy and undrawable, does have a fixed bond length (120 pm) and bond strength (5.1 ev). In combustion this structure is rearranged with closer and stronger bonds, meaning some emf is made “available”.

For scientists of chemistry who may want to ridicule the language, there is a reminder that in the best textbooks, atom “seek” equilibrium and entropy is said to be “unavailable” energy.

Useful personification of the inanimate is not new.

The reason combustion of a fuel releases energy is not because the bond forces after the event are greater than before. The reason is because before combustion more bond forces were required to keep the molecules stable (structural maintenance). Through injection of a small force (a spark) the bonds are broken and fall in to a tighter bonding in the products.

The bond between carbon and oxygen is about double the original bond between carbon and hydrogen.

The analysis of a single molecule aggregates to observable quantities of fuel. In ignorance economic actors enjoy 5 mj released from a mole of gasoline (don’t ask about the minus sign), whereas a realistic presentation is an estimate that bond forces requiring 239 mj to hold matter together were broken and then locked into new molecules only requiring 234 mj (See Supplementary Material for calculations). The unneeded 5 mj is available for economic use but comes at great cost.

In attempting to explain the impact on the ecosystem of fuel combustion, it is not just the change in bond energies that should be calculated. The whole molecules are a complex matrix of emf built up from proton-electron pairs, and their totals are estimated in mj/mol. These are big numbers but the saving in reduced total energy needed to maintain the product molecules is small.

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and facilities that capture the flows of released energy were manufactured and their history from extraction, processing, assembly and transport is the history of past bond trades.

Figure 3 graphs the estimated number of oxygen-oxygen bonds broken by human volition 1750 up to 2017 and projected onward to 2040. The period starts with most work done by heavy panting—labor fueled by food and fodder, supplemented by fires fueled by wood and lamps flickering on oil from animal fat. Coal supplanted firewood as main fuel mid nineteenth century.

Progress made through capital formation can be modeled by application of an inverse version of Figure 2 to the timeline of Figure 3. The process depicted in Figure 2 represents an engine of growth inhaling oxygenoxygen on the right and the bonds broken by trading for an oxygencarbon bond to reduce the need for internal structural maintenance of the atoms involved. The emf released is directed out the left side to “do” something such as heating or moving.

Humans have evolved complex organizations and systems that produce goods and services that can then be built on for further gains in perceived wellbeing. It is like a rolling railway operation that lays line and peripheral infrastructure as it progresses.

In Figure 3 the chemical reaction depicted in Figure 2 represents all the technical processes that trade an oxygen atom for a carbon bond “profiting” 3.2 ev. It can be conceptualized as a juggernaut climbing the slope of human progress, being able to rise higher through the benefits of highorder, low-entropy capital that has been laid out up to that point. The red arrow is not quantified in this paper but suggests an avenue of insights for further research. It represents high entropy inexorably produced from the

Envisioning reaction and can lead to the choking of further progress.

The almost flat line along the X axis is a record before the “sharp rise in energy” shown in such graphs as presented in by the International Energy Agency (IEA)14 and the World Bank.15 The IEA uses as units, millions of tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) and the World Bank, terawatt hours (Twh) to unify various forms of energy. In so doing the concept of energy becomes even more abstract than dollars.

Money feels real, even though it is an abstraction, yet what it is supposed to represent is subject to misunderstanding and manipulation. Oxygen molecules are real and we die without them in minutes. The oxygen-oxygen bond is real and fixed. Oxygen is an invisible gas, but the bond between atoms is strong and real like the bonds between atoms in a bar of iron. The bonds and the matrix of charges in electron-proton pairs that makes them are Feynman’s “little blobs”. Unlike money they cannot be magically conjured up. Though tricky at the level of macroeconomics or enterprise cost-benefit analysis they are an aggregate of the number of breaths made by workers and the oxygen flow drawn in by engines and furnaces.

The more complex the process the greater the distance and time in the cost chains. But unlike economics in money terms, micro-economic activity adds up to macro-economics. The model is an advance on the currently promoted textbook “circular flow of the economy” that draws inspiration from farming in France around 1750.

The model does not address nuclear energy drawn from the entirely different strong force inside nuclei.

A caveat needs to be assigned to the key word, “growth”. This paper makes no comment on what the aggregate of goods and services in a nation should be. Apart from producing “goods”

Figure 2. In the simplest hydrocarbon, the mol of methane is said to “produce” or “release” about 8 megajoules of energy made available for economic use. In this figure it is shown that what we call energy is about 2 percent of the internal energy of the atoms in the reactants, and is the result of a small saving in structural maintenance of the new compounds because of their slightly tighter bonds.

Figure 3. From the start of the industrial revolution through to expected purposive release of energy in 2040 global annual aggregate has risen from 4 to 874 exajoules. The annual number of oxygen-oxygen molecules broken can be tracked and is projected to be 1,343 x1036 in 2040.

there are also “bads” produced, but they are driven by the same technologies as goods and therefore show up on Figure 3. The critique of this paper is that leaders become possessed of growth mania and encourage professionals in economics and finance to come up with dollar values that are supposed to reflect good leadership, even if there are no material benefits. The US Treasury $700 billion stimulus concocted on 19 September 2008 required no material reality. It cannot show up on a Figure 3 graph.

In the two bar charts at the top of this article the problem is hidden in dollar accounts until 2010, but in physical economic activity (and lack of it) the signs begin in 2001.

Summing up This approach delivers a model of economic activity on a scale in time and magnitude from Adam Smith’s example of hunters trading deer and beaver up to the existing global economy. The knowledge that grand activities consist of real atoms and

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Envisioning be traced to aspirated engines, biological and mechanical.

• Production, including GDP, requires economic action, and the cost of that activity has a scientific basis.

• GDP measured as trading chemical bonds cannot be conjured up.

• The raw and earthy truth is hard work requires heavy breathing and in modern major projects that work is embodied in resources, capital equipment and infrastructure as well as direct human labor.

• In the two bar charts at the start of this paper, had analysts used the first chart, they would see sluggish activity beginning 2001 would lead to a financial crisis.

Figure 4. Opening of a 2013 article in the journal of the China Ministry of Ecology and Environment comparing simple laborer with the (then) real estate developer, Donald Trump, with “scores” in gigajoules for contributions and damage to their surroundings

their real bonds means that cursory material flow analysis can highlight errors that supposed “due diligence” by financial accountants may miss.

Anomalies draw focus and any entropy error, by ignorance or design, will unfold. Investors who care about their money will want this approach applied to any project targeted.

The current reliance on conventional economic models as a basis for financial analysis may lead to an assumption that any big amount of money is an aggregate of the small amounts most people are familiar with in daily activities. But devious manipulation of the money numbers in large activities is endemic. A stimulus package is a game with key players arguing wild, huge numbers. In high-profile

sales, the prices can be outlandishly contrived through collusion to alter market dynamics. A quick assessment of the “weight of work” in any activity and transaction is a wholesome reality check. Ultimately, any goods or service item can be traced back to the work done and its equivalent weight lifted (this makes more sense than calories of heating, and much closer to reality than linking big dollars to the price of apples or a week’s wages). In any item the trail of oxygen bonds must add up.

It relates to work done. Machines or people worked for it.

In short: • This approach jolts analysts of economic activity to acknowledge cost require work and work can

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It is the aspiration of this paper that scientists and economists can work together to refine an objective numerical scoring system to assess the costs of human activity. One direction to be developed, to be understood and accepted by analysts of economy and society is to estimate (as referenced in an article in the journal of the China Ministry of Ecology and Environment, opening depicted Figure 4) for an individual the general observed benefits contributed (numerator) and also the draw-down on the environment imposed by such activities (denominator).

References 1. Costanza, R. et al. Time to leave GDP behind. Nature.

505 (3). 2014.

2. Costanza, R. et al. Toward a sustainable wellbeing economy. Solutions. Volume 9 Issue 2 April 2018 3. Button, D. Stop obsessing about GDP: we should focus on wellbeing, The Guardian. 10 June 2019 4. Kahn, J & Yardley, J. As China roars, pollution reaches deadly extremes. The New York Times, 26 August, 2007.

5. Kubiszewski, I. et al. Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress. Ecological Economics. Vol 93. September 2013.

6. Odum, HT. Environment, Power and Society. Columbia University Press. New York. 2007

Envisioning

Pull-Out Box No 2. Detail at the Level of Atoms is Presented in this Figure.

It is shown in the center of Figure 2 in the text.

Presenting analysis of methane combustion at the atomic level. In the figure, the electromagnetic force between valence electron and their proton partners are shown in black. This internal energy is 425.6 ev for the total of 4 oxygen atoms, 1 carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms (if they existed as single atoms). Bonding allows energy saving of 10.2 ev (oxygen) and 17.2 ev (methane). This reduces total internal energy to 398.2 ev. On combustion the rearranged atoms are bonded tighter so that total internal energy is 389.4 ev and 8.4 ev is the “change in enthalpy” which economic actors call available energy.

7. Szargut, J. Exergy Method. WIT Press. Southhampton.

2005 8. Georgescu-Roegen, N. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Harvard University Press.

Cambridge, MA. 1971.

9. Feynman, R. Feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_04. html 10. Coulter, J. The chemistry of markets. Ecological Economics. Volume 41. January 2002

11. Hellegers, P. et al. interactions between water,

early notions to markets and payment schemes.

Ecological Economics. Volume 69, Issue 6. 1 April

energy, food and environment: evolving perspectives and policy issues. Water Policy 10

2010.

Supplement 1. 2008.

14. https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/

12. Bennett, G. et al. Natural infrastructure investment and implications for the nexus: A global overview.

Ecosystem Services 17, 2016.

changing-energy-sources

13. Gómez-Baggethun, E. et al. The history of ecosystem services in economic theory and practice: From

publication/KeyWorld2017.pdf 15. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-and16. Coulter, J. Ecological civilization is a numerical score. World Environment Volume 3. 2013.

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Murti R. and S. L. Mathez-Stiefel. (2019). Nature-Based Solutions for Coping with Disaster and Climate Change Risks— An Approach that Needs to be Rooted in Social Learning. Solutions 10(3): 16-20. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/nature-based-solutions-for-coping-with-disaster-and-climate-change-risks-an-approach-that-needs-to-berooted-in-social-learning

Perspectives Nature-Based Solutions for Coping with Disaster and Climate Change Risks— An Approach that Needs to be Rooted in Social Learning

by Radhika Murti and Sarah Lan Mathez-Stiefel

C

an nature provide society with the solutions it needs to cope with great challenges such as global climate change and increased occurrence of natural disasters?

Nature-based Solutions to Societal Challenges (NbS) is an approach that can support sustainable development and environmental conservation aspirations and is defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as “actions to protect, manage and restore natural or modified ecosystems, which address societal challenges, effectively and adaptively, providing human wellbeing and biodiversity benefits”.1 Similar to other proposed pathways towards sustainability such as promoting socio-ecological2 wellbeing, rethinking modern lifestyles based on production and consumption,3 reforming governance and political systems4 and challenging capitalism,5 the overshadowing argument for NbS holds that humans and nature cannot be treated separately. This especially holds considering the feedbacks and interdependencies between societal development and nature conservation needs.6 Subsequently, NbS aspires to simultaneously attain local communities wellbeing and biodiversity wellbeing,1 or serves as an economic strategy for growth and development while protecting the underpinning environmental services.7 As NbS gains momentum, it is useful to explore and learn from opportunities, risks and innovations associated with it, in order to inform future implementation to enhance the chances of its success as a sustainability solution. Social learning can

be a viable approach in supporting such exploring and learning, given its construct as an iterative process for collective learning that leads to collective understanding and consequently, collective change in behaviours towards desired actions.8

Opportunities for Disaster and Climate Risk Management NbS is relevant to both, urban and rural contexts. In tackling the average temperature rise of Budapest by 1.5 degree Celsius since the 1970s the local authorities have chosen to establish community gardens and ‘pocket parks’ by removing concrete or utilising idle green spaces. Together with regulating the micro-climate, water retention, small-scale food production and reduced air pollution are anticipated benefits in the long term.9 Similarly, NbS has been implemented in rural communities of Burkina Faso to address drought and desertification by restoring vegetation cover and soil through endogenous techniques such as demi lune and Zaï.10 These are farming techniques that require digging of soil in particular ways to maximise soil moisture retention and therefore increase the chances of seedling success.

Pic of Demi-Lune—Zai….

The solutions can also be applied at different scales. Smaller scale actions such as green roofing for individual buildings in cities can regulate temperature during warm weather. The Medmerry project in the United Kingdom on managed realignment of coastal protection infrastructure for flooding aims to provide greater flood protection for 360 properties,

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protection of hard infrastructure such as main roads and waste water treatment facilities as well as creation of natural salt marshes and mudflats that serve as biodiversity sanctuaries.11 Furthermore, NbS is promoted as being cost effective, environmentally friendly and low carbon alternatives that provide simultaneous multiple benefits for biodiversity and human wellbeing. Green spaces in cities can improve public health (reduced pollution and mental wellbeing), support biodiversity habitats and provide recreational opportunities for the urban populations.12

Meeting Multiple Goals for Multiple Gains While NbS has increasingly gained recognition in the past four years, it is important that the term is not exploited to the detriment of human wellbeing or biodiversity gains.13 This is central to the definition—to be an NbS, a solution must meet both, biodiversity and human wellbeing goals.1 Restoring slopes with monoculture plantations for slope stability may reduce hazard risks and reduce runoff, however it may not contribute towards reversing the biodiversity loss that may have occurred. Furthermore, the plant species used for restoration may be more susceptible to other factors such as disease outbreak, making the NbS an unviable solution in the longer term. Similarly, if an area under conservation is primarily for protecting vulnerable species and there is no direct or indirect ecosystem service being derived for human populations (for example due to the remote location of the area) then it cannot

Perspectives

IUCN/Monty

Making of zaï pits in Tougou village, Burkina Faso

be regarded as an NbS. Therefore, an accurate interpretation and understanding of NbS as an approach for both, people and biodiversity needs to be widely shared. Moreover, piloting and explorative efforts for NbS need careful planning, execution and importantly, monitoring, due to the inherent complexities and dynamism of ecosystems14 as well as the changing conditions of ecosystems and services due to impacts of climate on nature.15 A certain agricultural species that may be climate resilient and support food security now could fail with future changes in temperature or rainfall patterns. Similarly, restoring vegetation along the coastline for protection from

coastal hazards may temporarily stabilise foreshore erosion if sea level rise and changing tidal oscillation patterns are not taken into account.

Leveraging the ‘Social Beings’ We Are Historically, humans have coped with rapid changes in temperature and precipitation from socially learning amongst themselves and through collective behaviour, with the resulting knowledge and experiences passed on through culture and language.16 Dealing with changes in such a way would have allowed societies to seek solutions to a problem by considering different (and even diverging)

perspectives as well as through using the collective knowledge of the group.

Similarly, while in modern society, the need for specialists and experts is critical in informing a problemsolving process, solutions to wicked sustainability problems requires a diverse group of problem solvers, given the complexity of the problems.

Groups of diverse problem solvers can out-perform groups of high ability problem solvers.17 Approaches that include all concerned stakeholders such as social learning can be leveraged in bringing diverse sets of knowledge and skills together for informing the design and implementation of NbS for disasters

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Perspectives NbS Solution

Purpose

Forms of Knowledge

Assisted vegetation regeneration

Improve soil water retention

• Scientific and local—validation/ selection of species and composition • International policy organization actors—tradeoffs with economically beneficial and non-economically beneficial species • Local—planting calendar and labor division

Construction of mud barriers

Reduce top soil run off

Formalised common mechanism for regulating the exploitation of natural resources

Overall sustainable use of natural resources for longer term resilience to disasters and climate change

Reduce top soil runoff Regulate water flows in flash floods

Avoid water stagnation which increases salinization

• Traditional—reviving and scaling up of this traditional technique • Local—changing tides and water level regimes to determine locations • Scientists—hydrological and climate change scenarios • Local—agreement on resource use policy • International policy organization actors—institutionalization via provincial committee and national Ministry • Scientific—guidance on determining parameters of ‘sustainable use’

Table 1. NbS Solutions and knowledge sources for informing actions10

and climate risks.18 Actors like ecosystem managers, climate change adaptation practitioners and disaster managers need to collectively define the problem, outline the context and identify solutions. Doing so can create shared ownership of NbS.19 Furthermore, social learning can help negate pre-existing perceptions of each other amongst actors. In the case of NbS such perceptions could include fearing the need to make a choice between conservation efforts and development aspirations for a community or country. It may also be related to concerns over NbS being a hidden green agenda that is driven by conservationists. However, as with any

such endeavour, it is important to be realistic and aware that conflicts could arise. In facilitating co-development of a project to apply NbS in the form of ecosystem management to floods, droughts, storm waves and wildfire risks management in Southern Cape, South Africa documented preconceived assumptions, embedded terminologies and entrenched thinking amongst the stakeholders as barriers for the process.20 The authors emphasize the need for strong facilitation skills and clear, common understanding of the objectives of the process in order to, successfully, work at and across the different knowledge boundaries.

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Common Action for a Common Cause A shared understanding of the problem and a collective ownership of the solution can trigger desirable changes in collective behaviour of a group, distinguishing such a response from aggregated individual preference that, at best, will ‘keep all happy’.21 Not only is the resulting solution well informed, there is also recognition and creation of a commonly shared value base for mobilizing action amongst the wide range of stakeholders.22 Mobilizing such action is especially important in the case of disasters and climate risk management, whereby a deeper collective understanding of

Perspectives the problem could support proactive behaviour and actions versus reactive responses after the event has taken place.18 Collective behaviour change and actions can also facilitate ambitious and creative nature based solutions and at scales that demonstrate the gains from cost effectiveness. Scale is a major consideration in cost effectiveness of NbS, for example, when used as natural infrastructure for flood protection, coastal hazard protection or water purification.23 Within its Green City, Clean Waters 25-year plan, Philadelphia aims to enhance the health of the city’s creeks and rivers through sustainable land management actions. With this and installation of rain gardens and storm water planters, the city aims to reduce its pollution and especially sewer overflows during heavy rains by 85 percent. Investing in such NbS is costing approximately USD$2.4 billion public funds versus an estimated USD$9.6 billion if grey or engineered infrastructure was used.24 Importantly, in collectively defining and acting upon an NbS, there is a higher likelihood that more (rather than less) stakeholders will have roles in execution. Therefore, willingness to act collectively makes space for participatory approaches such as co-management of natural resources amongst stakeholders or institutions.

Co-management can enhance abilities to cope with variability and address longer-term adaptive needs, despite the risks and uncertainties involved.25 However, in enabling collective action, stakeholders often need to be able to see the resulting mutual benefits.

Therefore, in promoting NbS for disasters and climate risks, it is important that the solution demonstrates a win-win scenario for those involved.

In the case of the Medmerry project, the £28 million initiative has involved building of a 7 km sea wall, however,

constructed 2 km inland (instead of building higher sea walls in the original locations along the coastline).

This lets the waters further inland yet reduces the risks of flooding and the surrendered land is increasingly becoming a biodiversity habitat for many species.11

of their land, together with scientists from the capital as well as international development experts pooled their knowledge and experiences to inform strategies, as described below.

In further encouraging the joint use of different forms of knowledge, it would be important to promote

NbS holds the potential to support human and biodiversity wellbeing in the face of disasters as well as the climatic risks we increasingly face today.

Complementing Different Forms of Knowledge to Navigate Uncertainties Nature is dynamic, complex and sometimes unpredictable. On the other hand, the increasing magnitudes and frequencies of climate related events, together with climate variability, also bring about additional dimensions of complexity when designing NbS for disaster and climate risks. There are still many unknowns in the science, policy and practice of using nature-based approaches for such risks.

Complementing different forms of knowledge is one way to support the development of locally relevant and feasible NbS solutions to disasters as well as climate change. Additionally, deliberations and plural perspectives give us better capacity to adapt to changing contexts and the uncertainties they bring about.14 Through the participatory process of Promoting Local Innovations, the Ecosystems Protecting Infrastructure and Communities (EPIC) project engaged scientific, traditional, experiential and local knowledge to inform NbS for droughts, flash flooding and soil salinization in Senegal. Communities, as experts

knowledge co-production partnerships amongst different actors such as scientists and practitioners.

Experiential knowledge can inform scientific knowledge and vice versa, which can further help deal with unknowns. However, there needs to be willingness amongst the different actors to work together in such a way.

In fostering collaboration for knowledge and action to operationalise an initiative on NbS for disaster risks, the entrenched way in which scientists exchange and produce knowledge needs to be addressed.20 Specifically, scientists need to consider flexible and adaptive ways to apply their skills to address the issues at hand.

Similar to complementing decision-making through different forms of knowledge, different fields of knowledge need to be combined to identify conservation or ecosystem management actions for human security from disasters and climate change.

Therefore, transdisciplinary research is essential in the success of NbS and can be achieved through establishing joint research initiatives amongst different disciplines and faculties (such as development, sustainability studies,

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Perspectives climate change, hazard managers and ecologists). This could effectively facilitate knowledge co-production, defined as “the collaborative process of bringing a plurality of knowledge sources and types together to address a defined problem and build an integrated or systems-oriented understanding of that problem”.26 Lack of understanding amongst stakeholders of how nature can help reduce disaster risks inhibits progress on policies that could support proactive risk reduction measures.27 In addition, a lack of focus on reduction of risks and instead prioritisation of emergency response actions also exacerbates reactive behaviour to disasters and climate risks.28 In Barbados, every USD1 invested in protecting the Folkestone Marine national park can reduce USD20 worth of damage caused by a cyclone, according to a study by SwissRe. The study further highlighted that up to 65 percent of the potential losses can be averted using costeffective and proactive measures.29

inherently requires for all of us to be willing to step into or even beyond our knowledge boundaries or sectoral confines and join forces, which social learning can help achieve.

NbS holds the potential to support human and biodiversity wellbeing in the face of disasters as well as the climatic risks we increasingly face today. However, as the term rapidly gains attention and momentum, it is important recognise that such a cross-sectoral approach needs a truly participatory framework. In supporting a participatory approach, the role of social learning can be fully leveraged to source a wide range of knowledge and skills from backgrounds such as ecology, environmental science, hazard risk modelling, disaster risk management, climate change modelling and the adaptation community, in order to create a collective understanding of the problem and define appropriate, co-owned and cost effective NbS responses. This

review of three historical cases and some general perspectives. Environ. Sci. Policy 8, 589–600 (2005).

17. Hong, L. & Page, S. Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers.

16385–16389 (2004).

18. Murti, R. & Mathez-Stiefel, S. Social Learning Approaches for Ecosystem-based Disaster Risk

References 1. Nature-based Solutions to address global societal challenges. (IUCN, 2016).

2. Olsson, P., Galaz, V. & Boonstra, W. J. Sustainability transformations: a resilience perspective. Ecol. Soc. 19, (2014).

3. Brand, U. & Wissen, M. What Kind of Great Transformation? The Imperial Mode of Living as a Major Obstacle to Sustainability Politics. GAIA Ecol. Perspect. Sci. Soc. 27, 287–292 (2018).

4. Patterson, J. Exploring the governance and politics

Reduction. Int. J. Disaster Risk Reduct. in press, (2018).

19. Cundill, G. & Rodela, R. A review of assertions about the processes and outcomes of social learning in natural resource management. J. Environ. Manage.

113, 7–14 (2012).

20. Sitas, N. et al. Fostering collaboration for knowledge and action in disaster management in South Africa.

Curr. Opin. Environ. Sustain. 19, 94–102 (2016).

21. Roling, N. Beyond the aggregation of individual preferences. Moving from multiple to distributed cognition in resource dilemmas. in Wheelbarrows

of transformations towards sustainability. Environ.

full of frogs—Social learning in rural resource

Innov. Soc. Transit. 24, 1–16 (2017).

management (eds. Leeuwis, C. & Pyburn, R.) 25–47

5. Pirgmaier, E. Marx for Environmentalists: Rise Up! Speak Up! Insist! GAIA - Ecol. Perspect. Sci. Soc. 27, 265–265 (2018).

6. Folke, C. The Economic Perspective: Conservation

(Van Gorcum, 2002).

22. Rist, S., Chidambaranathan, M. .. Escobar,C. ..

Wiesmann, U. .. Zimmermann, A. Moving from sustainable management to sustainable governance

against Development versus Conservation for

of natural resources: The role of social learning

Development. Conserv. Biol. 20, 686–688 (2006).

processes in rural India, Bolivia and Mali. J. Rural

7. European Commission. Towards an EU Research and Innovation Policy Agenda for Nature-based Solutions

Stud. 23, 23–37 (2007).

23. Gartner, T., Mulligan, J., Schmidt, R. & Gunn, J.

& Re-naturing Cities: Final Report of the Horizon 2020

Natural Infrastructure, Investing in Forested Landscapes

Expert Group on ‘Nature-based Solutions and Re-

for Source Water Protection in the United States. (WRI,

naturing Cities’. (Publications Office, 2015).

8. Reed, M. S. et al. What is social learning? Ecol. Soc. 15,

Conclusion

16. Orlove, B. Human adaptation to climate change: a

(2010).

9. Oppla. Budapest - NBS for climate resilience and pollution control. Oppla case studies (2018).

Available at: https://oppla.eu/node/18003. (Accessed: 13th March 2019) 10. Monty, F., Murti, R., Miththapala, S. & Buyck, C.

2013).

24. Stutz, B. With a Green Makeover, Philadelphia Is Tackling Its Stormwater Problem. (2018). Available at: https://e360.yale.edu/features/with-a-greenmakeover-philadelphia-tackles-its-stormwaterproblem. (Accessed: 14th March 2019) 25. Armitage, D., Berkes, F., Dale, A., KochoSchellenberg, E. & Patton, E. Co-management and

Ecosystems protecting infrastructure and communities:

the co-production of knowledge: Learning to adapt

lessons learned and guidelines for implementation.

in Canada’s Arctic. Symp. Soc. Theory Environ. New

(IUCN, 2017).

11. Thomas, A. Medmerry Coastal Realignment: Success for People and Wildlife. (RSPB, unpublished).

12. Lafortezza, R., Chen, J., van den Bosch, C. K. & Randrup, T. B. Nature-based solutions for resilient landscapes and cities. Environ. Res. 165, 431–441 (2018).

13. Eggermont, H. et al. Nature-based Solutions : New Influence for Environmental Management and

World Disord. 21, 995–1004 (2011).

26. Armitage, D., Berkes, F., Dale, A., KochoSchellenberg, E. & Patton, E. Co-management and the co-production of knowledge: Learning to adapt in Canada’s Arctic. Symp. Soc. Theory Environ. New World Disord. 21, 995–1004 (2011).

27. Renaud, F. G., Sudmeier-Rieux, K. & Estrella, M. The Role of Ecosystems in Disaster Risk Reduction. (United Nations University Press, 2013).

Research in Europe. GAIA 24, 243–248 (2015).

28. Briceño, S. Looking Back and Beyond Sendai: 25 Years

14. Reyers, B., Nel, J. L., O’Farrell, P. J., Sitas, N. & Nel,

of International Policy Experience on Disaster Risk

D. C. Navigating complexity through knowledge coproduction: Mainstreaming ecosystem services into disaster risk reduction. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 112,

Adaptation in Barbados - facts for decision-making.

7362 (2015).

in Safe Havens: Protected Areas for Disaster Risk

15. Calliari, E., Staccione, A. & Mysiak, J. An assessment

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Reduction. Int. J. Disaster Risk Sci. 6, 1–7 (2015).

29. Mueller, L. & Bresch, D. Economics of Climate

Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation (eds. Murti,

framework for climate-proof nature-based

R. & Buyck, C.) 15–21 (IUCN, International Union

solutions. Sci. Total Environ. 656, 691–700 (2019).

for Conservation of Nature, 2014).

Tunstall, T. (2019). Reconciling Ecosystem Services with Economic Theory and Policy. Solutions 10(3): 21-28. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/reconciling-ecosystem-services-with-economic-theory-and-policy

Perspectives Reconciling Ecosystem Services with Economic Theory and Policy

by Thomas Tunstall

C

onventional economic models fail to incorporate a full picture of long-term drivers of economic activity and societal benefit. In the quest for a false sense of precision, the models have become ever more complicated and essentially incomprehensible to policy makers.1 Perhaps not surprisingly, the methodologically rigorous models are subject to wholesale modification and revision in the wake of a financial crisis.

A fuller picture of the drivers of the economy in the 21st century that includes more interdisciplinary and comprehensive approaches to understanding and monitoring would better benefit policymakers. Too many economics-related schools of thought have become disconnected from the physical world. Land, or more generally natural capital, figured prominently in the thinking of classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Starting in the 19th century, land was de-emphasized in favor of labor and capital as areas of primary focus.

Monetary analysis also became more prevalent.2 In fact, mainstream economic training no longer requires study into properties of natural capital and ecosystem services relative to other areas.

Part of the dilemma is related to the role of the history of economic thought as opposed to economic history—two different subjects. The general belief that economic thought has evolved from classical political economy elaborated by Francois Quesnay (1694–1774) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) to more sophisticated forms such as neoclassical and neoKeynesian may be misplaced. Recent

events, such as the financial crisis of 2007–08, merely highlight the more general failure of economic policies based on a too-limited conception of the economy.

Neoclassical economic anomalies have come under scrutiny by behavioral economists such as recent Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler in an attempt to connect theory with what humans actually do in the real world.

Even so, economists continue to favor abstract models. The resulting lack of robustness handicaps policymakers and is a disservice to society as a whole.3 Currently lacking is a more complete framework.

Environmental Sinks Recent work suggests that the most important environmental issue that nations will face in the future is not availability of non-renewable natural resources, but rather the environmental sink—the ability of the earth to absorb waste and regenerate renewable resources (or ecosystem services).

A closely related issue is what level of ecosystem services can be consumed at or below the regeneration rate of renewable natural capital. O’Hara4 argues that economic production functions are largely irrelevant outside societal and physical (environmental) contexts. Yet, too often the economy

Recent work suggests that the most important environmental issue that nations will face in the future is not availability of non-renewable natural resources, but rather the environmental sink—the ability of the earth to absorb waste and regenerate renewable resources.

This paper is intended to serve as a policy guide that attempts to link economic theory with issues that are either ignored or not yet synthesized into mainstream economic thought, and bridge the gap between oversimplification on the one hand, and unmanageable complexity on the other. Further, microeconomic, macroeconomic, societal and environmental drivers remain compartmentalized from a policy perspective and would benefit from greater interdisciplinary approaches to analysis.

is interpreted as its own world, which merely overlaps periodically with society and the environment, as depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 2 more aptly demonstrates the position that economics occupies in the grand scheme. The economy is necessarily nested within natural and human-based systems. In addition, many economic-like activities occur outside of the purely economic sector and, as a result, do not show up as gross output. Such activities include household-provided goods

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Perspectives and services, community support systems, or many aspects of ecosystem services derived from natural capital.5 This paper attempts to develop a more comprehensive, yet concise, approach to economic policy than that offered by neoclassical or neo-Keynesian approaches.

More recently, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models have been developed by central banks to attempt to capture the complex nature of modern economies from the bottom-up. These models seek to forecast not only a single quarter into the future, but also to an infinite time horizon. Such an approach requires approximations and computer simulations to solve even simple DSGE models.1 The mix of variables continues to shift as central bank economists attempt to refine the process, but examples include real GDP, private consumption, total investment, exports, imports, a GDP deflator, a consumption deflator, employment, nominal wages, nominal interest rate, real exchange rate, etc. However, conceptually important variables that are difficult to represent numerically are not included.6 Despite the wide range of indicators used to try to forecast economic growth and the impact of shocks to general equilibrium, the ultimate weakness of DSGE models is the focus on the closed system of inputs and outputs, underpinned by the neoclassical belief that manmade capital can be substituted for natural capital (weak sustainability), and by extension for ecosystem services. The strong sustainability approach establishes a clear distinction between natural capital and built capital.7 Prior to the 21st century, the use of a closed system could perhaps have been justified because the world was less crowded than it is now. Nonetheless, a more realistic approach was developed

Source: O’Hara 2015

Figure 1. Partial Sustainability

Source: Kakovitch and O’Hara 2013: 6

Figure 2. Sustainability

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Perspectives in the 1970s by Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen, which proposed variables that neoclassical economics neglects.

The levels of complexity associated with ecosystem services goes well beyond the classical economists and figures nominally, if at all, in neoclassical theory. Yet natural capital and ecosystem services are deterministic drivers of human economic activity that largely continue to be depleted and degraded.10 Without critical ecosystem services, humans and animals cannot survive.

Extending the analysis, Figure 3 maps the implied spatial/temporal curve of ecosystem service regeneration based on analysis by Fremier et al.,11 which suggests that as spatial scale of impact increases, temporal scales increase much faster—up to a point. In other words, the larger the geography impacted by waste entering the environmental sink, the longer the period required for ecosystem service regeneration.

The curve highlights how the more numerous impacts tend to be local and can be remediated in shorter timeframes than larger scale impacts such as climate change and ocean acidification. From a public policy standpoint, there has been a failure to develop a comprehensive framework that visually portrays the numerous, disparate impacts of non-recycled waste on the environmental sink, and thus contributes to the general lack of awareness of the range of accumulating pressure on natural capital to regenerate ecosystem services.

Equation 1 below depicts a standard neoclassical production function. Neoclassical conceptions of the economy are linear and have largely abandoned the role of nature that was previously embedded in classical economics.8 Neoclassical economics notoriously simplifies the classical economist view of the economy by assuming that natural capital (land) and built capital (capital) are perfectly substitutable, consistent with the weak sustainability approach. Thus, land is conveniently dropped from the production function, which simplifies matters considerably. Such a model is clearly a highly abstract way of depicting the factors that generate output for a given economy.

Y = f(K,L) (1) where:

Y K L

= output = capital = labor

Equation 2 presents an expanded view of a standard production function that now includes the concept of entropy. The economy is in a continuous state of transforming low-entropy input (e.g., solar radiation, fossil fuels) into high-entropy output, part of which includes waste products. Considerations of entropy do not typically populate standard economic models.

Q0T (t) = F [R0 T (t), I0 T (t), M0 T (t), W0 T (t), L0 T (t), K0 T (t), H0 T (t)] (2) where:

Q R I M W L K H t T

= output flow of products = natural resources = intermediate materials from other production process (e.g., lumber) = maintenance materials for existing capital (e.g., replacement parts) = waste = Ricardian land (capable of providing rents as described in classical economics) = capital (e.g., buildings and equipment) = labor = point in time = cumulative time periods under analysis

In Equation 2, subscripts describe the interval under analysis, and superscripts indicate overall duration.9 Although the model was developed in 1971, key components have yet to make their way into mainstream economic debate. In particular, M, W and T address issues of entropy that standard economic models omit.

Georgescu-Roegen’s approach provides a more complete framework for inputs or flow elements that constitute the production process. For example, W (waste) is invariably treated as an externality and is thus exogenous to typical economic modeling. Yet it is properly integral to Georgescu-Roegen’s model.

Gordon’s Inflection Point: 1870 By incorporating patterns that can be derived from a more systematic look at the panorama of economic history we can better understand why so many economic models fall down on the job. In particular, the history of economic thought and

technological development that derives from its origins is relatively short. The study of economics dates back only to Quesnay (1694–1774).

Just a century later, around 1870 with economics still in relative infancy, unprecedented change began to take

place that had implications for society and the environment which remain underappreciated.

Robert Gordon notes that essentially no economic growth occurred in the eight centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the

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Perspectives

The accumulating impact of non-recycled waste on ecosystem services suggests the prospect of a revised production function that draws a distinction between natural capital and built capital (Equation 3). Natural capital stocks have been replaced by ecosystem services flows. Non-recycled waste is also explicitly included, as this poses a potential limit to the provision of ecosystem services. Built capital (KB) represents the flow of services from depreciating assets during their useful lives.

Y = f(E, KB , L, Wß )

(3)

where:

Y E KB L Wß

= output = ecosystem services = built capital = labor = non-recycled waste

Wß must be absorbed by the environmental sink, which taxes the ability of natural capital to regenerate and provide ecosystem services. As Wß approaches the limits of the sink, ecosystem system services begin to degrade with increasing acceleration. Where these points are reached—depending on geographic scope of the ecosystem service in question— remains a topic of ongoing research.

Since ecosystem services are derived from natural capital, then E ∈ KN, where KN = natural capital.

Waste is a byproduct of industrial processes, whether recycled or non-recycled, and as such are elements of built capital: Wa + Wß ∈ KB, where Wa = recycled waste. The waste accumulation curve in Figure 4 follows the general form of exponential increase to a limit: y = aebx + c. The non-linear, in fact exponential nature of the curve implies a policy goal of Wß = 0 in order to ensure strong sustainability in the face of future uncertainty regarding the valuation of natural capital and the corresponding ability of ecosystem services to regenerate after absorbing non-recycled waste.

Middle Ages. From 1300-1700, things were only marginally better, when real output per person in Britain only doubled over that 400 year interval. By contrast, during the twentieth century in the U.S., output per person doubled every 32 years.

Gordon’s ultimate thesis is that the inventions and innovations in terms of quality of life between 1870 and 1970 were transformative in an unparalleled fashion, with significant implications for the twenty-first century. Of particular note is the fact that the transformation which occurred in the U.S. and most of the developed world cannot be repeated.

Those gains have been taken and

future productivity increases will be dependent on other new innovations.

A significant part of the increase in standards of living, equality and economic productivity was the result of the networked home and business—something unheard of in all the previous centuries of human existence.

These networks consisted of five components that are all too familiar now, and yet to which modern economies are oddly disconnected from or even oblivious to, short of some natural disaster that disrupts them: electricity, gas, telephone (which now includes the internet), water and sewer.12 Most residents of developed countries live far better than kings and nobles just

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two centuries ago. Yet, this too is often forgotten in the hustle-bustle of consumer society that increasingly taxes ecosystem services through escalating depletion and degradation.

A whole host of inventions and innovations that constitute routine aspects of urban planning—which defines in large measure how we live today—did not become widely available until the early twentieth century.

It’s worth noting here, for example, that the term infrastructure dates back only as far as 1875. There were no U.S. corporations in 1870, and the average factory at the time employed less than ten people.13 The first age of globalization began in the 1870s with export-led growth in commodities from developing countries to the industrializing Western world.14 As the scale of industry and cities increased, new theories were developed in an attempt to explain them. Neoclassical economics traces its roots back to the 1870s.15 16 For simplicity and due to the assumption of substitutability of natural capital with built capital, after about 1880, AngloAmerican economists took nature out of economics altogether,17 as explicitly postulated by Robert Solow.18 Another example of progress that substantially raised standards of living was the germ theory of disease in the 1870s that set the stage for increased average longevity. The other two key developments that had huge increases in life expectancy were marked decreases in infant mortality, and the use of antibiotics. Since then, virtually all medical innovations have been highly incremental in nature for society as a whole in terms of increased longevity.

Other examples abound of how unusual the great inventions of the late 19th and early 20th century were.

The prototype electric kitchen exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair looks

Perspectives

Adapted from Fremier, et al. 2013

Figure 3. Effective Management of Ecosystem Services—Lags Between Production and Consumption. (Solid gray line indicates increasing importance of management/payment for ecosystem services. Dotted gray line suggests spatiotemporal trade-offs of sink functions and ecosystem services.)

remarkably like modern kitchens.19 Air travel by jet was introduced in the 1950s and has not improved significantly since.20 And travel by automobile has improved only incrementally since the earliest days of mass production.

Marc Levinson makes the case that the Golden age of productivity growth between 1948–1973 is giving way to a prolonged period of ordinary economic performance.21 Indeed, all of the above events occurred near the end of the most technologically dynamic epoch in the United States.22 These developments suggest that western

economies may be experiencing an extended period of limited total factor productivity growth.

Perhaps most significantly, measures of happiness in the developed world have not improved noticeably in the past 50 years since the widespread adoption of the five network connections identified above.23, 24, 25 Increasing wealth no longer appears to increase happiness and well-being.26, 27, 28, 29, 30 Generally speaking, a happy life requires relatively few straightforward elements and is similarly defined by several authors. Methods used to describe a full or satisfying life include

as few as four basic components: family, community, faith and vocation.31 Maslow identified five needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.32 Skidelsky and Skidelsky30 list seven aspects: health, security, respect, personal autonomy, harmony with nature, friendship, and leisure. However one may be inclined to quibble with the definitions, what is clear is that most of the developed world has access to all of them. Yet a consumer-oriented society still drives people to clamor for more, irrespective of concerns about environmental sustainability.

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Perspectives Future Jobs Neoclassical belief that the economy can expand indefinitely into an essentially infinite universe might have turned out to be (and may yet become) a workable concept had space travel become as commonplace as envisioned. The idea of earth travelers routinely visiting nearby planets, asteroids and stars once seemed a near certainty based on the work of science fiction writers featured as far back as 1865, when Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon. H.G. Wells penned his first novel in 1895, and the serialized science fiction publications such as Amazing Stories began to appear in 1926. But space travel and many other engaging technologies turned out to be more problematic puzzles to solve than first believed. As another example of unfulfilled technological optimism, the Mr. Fusion device powering Dr. Emmett Brown’s DeLorean in Back To The Future—fed by discarded trash: banana peels, stale beer, and aluminum cans—appears to be a long way off as well.

In the case of human lifespans, any upturns on the scale accomplished between 1870 and the end of the 20th century (an increase of 33 years for the average person) appear unlikely.12 So many of the future breakthrough technologies envisioned in the early part of the 20th century have failed to materialize, in contrast to the way transformative inventions such as electricity, motorized vehicles, and motion pictures did in the latter part of the 19th century.

In the absence of game-changing technological advances, maintaining the infrastructure that supports the quality of life achieved over the 20th century will dominate public policy discussion. Rebuilding the aging US infrastructure as proposed by the Trump administration, for example, only maintains current living

standards. From a functional standpoint, reconstructing or upgrading existing infrastructure does nothing particularly new.

This paper posits that the world has reached the point where, for the foreseeable future, the overriding goal of developed nations will be to simply maintain the standard of living achieved over the past century and a half. If true, such a controversial paradigm begins to answer the question of what new jobs in the future will look like.

In the broadest terms, many people will be employed to maintain sufficient regenerative capacity in ecosystem services necessary to provision a global population of 10 billion or more. There will be ample opportunity for increases in research and development into nascent areas such as fusion power and gene therapy, though public policy in this direction remains uncertain. Depending on the speed of planetary warming and the impact of climate change, resilience and mitigation planning will engage large segments of the workforce as droughts, hurricanes, typhoons and other events become more prevalent.

These will be important jobs that will certainly challenge human intellect and creativity, but again serve—at best—simply to maintain existing standards of living.

Policy Implications What may come as a surprise to many is that world population is set to level off somewhere between nine and twelve billion people between 2050–2070, and then almost certainly begin to decline—assuming the planet can continue to sustain such large numbers until that time.33 Upcoming demographic shifts will have significant implications for elderly care, traditional rural labor surpluses from developing countries

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and future population migration patterns. Continued global migration, for example, will enable developed countries to address declining population.

Another issue that classical political economy or a more ecologically-oriented view of economics will be better able to address has to do with the tendency of industrial economies tend to overproduce—whether capitalist, communist, socialist, social democratic, or capitalist communist.

Oversupply of commodities—agricultural products (e.g., beef, dairy, eggs) or copper and oil, or housing—have frequently caused price deflation.

All industrialized economies have regularly demonstrated the ability to become efficient and overproduce.

This propensity to overproduce is partly a function of ever more efficient automation, but also stems from the ability of firms to utilize “free” ecosystem services and natural capital that are underpriced relative to long-term value. Current price mechanisms for ecosystem services simply do not reflect full replacement costs. Preliminary work has been undertaken that demonstrate the value-added ratios using current pricing for industrial activities such as solid waste combustion, coal-fired electric power generation, and sewage treatment are negative from an air quality standpoint alone. A full set of environmental accounts would encompass not only air, but also water pollution, solid waste, and hazardous waste as part of the national economic accounts system.34 With a world population estimated to be 9–12 billion before the end of the 21st century, the earth is on track to become a much more crowded place. A planet that full of people will have to be managed very differently.

Pressure on limited resources and ecosystem services—exacerbated by growing inequality—will generate

Perspectives

Figure 4. Implied Curve of Trade-Offs Between Temporal and Spatial Scales

greater instability, resulting in political conflict and broad institutional changes.14, 35 Yet once the peak occurs, global population will almost certainly begin to decline, at least gradually by the mid-to-late 21st century.33 This novel scenario will present its own set of fresh challenges for future economists.

Gradual global population decline on its way to some kind of steady-state may be as difficult to navigate as the more densely populated earth in the decades ahead. A political economy addressing naturally occurring population decreases has not been articulated. Similarly, a departure from growth-only economics has no precedent in industrialized economies.

In the meantime, societies will confront important choices in the years ahead. Jared Diamond outlines two strategies that have prevented ecological and societal collapse in various geographies throughout history. The first is long-term planning, and the second is the willingness to reexamine societal core values.36 Both of these items will present non-trivial challenges for developed countries to address.

Long-term planning is not the hallmark of most industrialized societies that often lurch from one election to the next. In the corporate world, the planning horizon is often shorter, from quarter to quarter.

Reexamining core values will not be an easy prospect either. Since the advent of consumer societies—in many ways driven by relentless depletion of ecosystem services—the basic components of what is needed for happiness has been largely lost. Instead, the more likely scenario is that the lifestyle to which the developed world should probably aspire will instead be forced upon it.

Perhaps one day fusion energy, space-based solar power or costeffective space travel will expand the feasible boundaries of the planetary ecosystem. However, for now, available ecosystem services provided by a finite planet with a surface area of 510 million square kilometers are all humans

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Perspectives have with which to work. In so many ways, planet earth will continue to get smaller in the years and decades ahead.

Primary Conclusions: • Long-term planning should figure more prominently into the policymaking decision process.

• Core societal values emphasizing consumer-oriented culture will not be sustainable and must be reexamined in favor of attributes that incorporate happiness and well-being, as opposed to material wealth exclusively.

• Standards of living are poised for only marginal improvement in the decades ahead. This likelihood implies that rebuilding aging U.S. infrastructure should become a national priority in order to avoid a decline in overall standards of living.

• Conventional, continuous-growth economic models will no longer maintain validity by the end of the 21st century. Economic models must be modified to incorporate viable steady state or no-growth frameworks.

• All industrialized society ideologies drive overproduction by overharvesting and overburdening ecosystems.

Industrialized economies should explicitly acknowledge the need to remedy the burden increasingly placed on deteriorating ecosystem services.

• Current market structures underprice industrial processes.

More research should be undertaken to properly price products and services according to their fully allocated costs.

• Long-term oriented research and development will be necessary to create a next generation of breakthrough technologies.

References 1. Korinek, Anton. 2015. “Thoughts on DSGE Macroeconomics: Matching the Moment, But Missing the Point,” Paper prepared for the 2015 Conference “A Just Society” honoring Joseph Stiglitz’s 50 years of teaching.

2. Hubacek, Klaus, and Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh.

2006. “Changing Concepts of ‘Land’ in Economic Theory: From Single to Multi-Disciplinary Approaches,” Ecological Economics 56(1): 5-27.

3. Watson, Matthew. 2014. Uneconomic Economics and the Crisis of the Model World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

4. O’Hara, Sabine. 2015. “From Sources to Sinks: Changing Rules of Production Theory,” World Future Review. 6(4): 448-454.

5. O’Hara, Sabine. 1997. “Toward a Sustaining Production

19. Ziegelman, Jane, and Andrew Cole. 2016. A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins.

20. Vijg, Jan. 2011. The American Technological Challenge: Stagnation and Decline in the 21st Century. New York: Algora Publishing.

21. Levinson, Marc. 2016. An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy. New York: Basic Books.

22. Field, Alexander J. (2011). A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth. New Haven: Yale University Press.

23. Clark, Andrew E., Paul Frijters and Michael A. Shields. 2008. “Relative Income, Happiness, and Utility: An Expalnation for the Easterlin Paradox and Other Puzzles,” Journal of Economic Literature

Theory,” Ecological Economics. 20(2): 141-154.

6. Christoffel, Kai, Günter Coenen and Anders Warne.

2010. “Forecasting with DSGE Models,” European Central Bank. Working Paper Series No. 1185.

7. Pelenc, Jérôme, and Jérôme Ballet. 2016. “Strong Sustainability, Critical Natural Capital and the Capability Approach,” Ecological Economics 112(1): 36-44.

8. Martins, Nuno Ornelas. 2016. “Ecosystems, Strong Sustainability and the Classical Circular Economy,” Ecological Economics. 129: 32-39.

9. Georgescu-Rogen, Nicholas. 1971. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

10. Diamond, Jared. 1999. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton.

11. Fremier, Alexander K., Fabrice A.J. DeClerck, Nilsa A. Bozque-Pérez, Natalia Estrada Carmona, Renée Hill, Taylor Joyal, Levi Keesecker, P. Zion Klos, Alejandra Martínez-Salinas, Ryan Niemeyer, Andre Sanfiorenzo, Kristen Welsh, and J.D. Wulfhorst.

2013. “Understanding Spatiotemporal Lags in Ecosystem Services to Improve Incentives,” BioScience. 63(6): 472-482.

12. Gordon, Robert J. 2016. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

13. Higgs, Kerryn. 2014. Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

14. Scheidel, Walter. 2017. The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

15. Blaug, Mark. 1985. Economic Theory in Retrospect, 4th edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

16. Gómez-Baggethun, Erik, Rudolf de Groot, Pedro L. Lomas, and Carlos Montes. 2010. Ecological Economics 69(): 1209-1218.

17. McNeill, J.R. 2000. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World.

New York: W.W. Norton.

18. Solow, Robert. 1974. “The Economics of Resources and the Resources of Economics,” American Economic Review 64(2): 1-14.

46(1): 95-144.

24. Diener, Ed, and Robert Biswas-Diener. 2002.

“Will Money Increase Subjective Well-Being?: A Literature Review and Guide to Needed Research,” Social Indicators Research. 57(2): 119-169.

25. Easterin, Richard A. 1995. “Will Raising the Incomes of All Increase the Happiness of All?” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. 27(1): 35-47.

26. Diener, Ed and Martin E.P. Seligman. 2004. “Beyond Money: Toward an Economy of Well-Being,” American Psychological Society. 5(1): 1-31.

27. Smith, Lisa M., Jason L. Case, Heather M. Smith, Linda C. Harwell, and J.K. Summers. 2013. “Relating Ecosystem Services to Domains of Human WellBeing: Foundation for a U.S. Index,” Ecological Indicators 28(1): 79-90.

28. Kubiszewski, Ida, Robert Costanza, Carol Franco, Philip Lawn, John Talberth, Tim Jackson, Camille Aylmer. 2013. “Beyond GDP: Measuring and Achieving Global Genuine Progress,” Ecological Economics. 93(1): 57-68.

29. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. 2014. New York: Simon and Schuster.

30. Skidelsky, Robert and Edward Skidelsky. 2012. How Much Is Enough: Money and the Good Life. New York: Other Press.

31. Murray, Charles. 2013. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. New York: Crown Publishing.

32. Maslow, A.H. 1943. “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review. 50(4): 370-396.

33. Robbins, Paul, and Sara H. Smith. 2016. “Baby Bust: Towards Political Demography,” Progress in Human Geography. 41(1): 1-21.

34. Muller, Nicholas Z., Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus. 2011. “Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy,” American Economic Review 101(5): 1649-1675.

35. Piketty, Thomas. 2015. “Putting Distribution Back at the Center of Economics: Reflections on Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Economic Perspectives. 29(1): 67-88.

36. Diamond, Jared. 2011. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books.

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Hull R. B. and R. Dooley. (2019). Collective Impact for Climate Mitigation. Solutions 10(3): 29-35. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/collective-impact-for-climate-mitigation

Feature

Collective Impact for Climate Mitigation

by R. Bruce Hull and Rich Dooley

Rich Dooley

Community Energy Task Force members.

In Brief Climate change is one of those wicked challenges whose solutions exceed the capacities of individual organizations, even governments. Many stakeholders must find ways to collaborate, innovate, and change business as usual. The Collective Impact method provides a set of best practices for coordinating such efforts.

This article illustrates a successful application in Arlington, Virginia, near Washington DC. It is one of the most ethnically diverse, densely populated, highly educated, and wealthy urban municipalities in the United States. The article also describes the basic components of a Community Energy Plan that any community can use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as make their energy systems more secure, reliable, and affordable. Solutions to our biggest challenges are obtainable when groups of stakeholders find ways to innovate and collaborate, such as is illustrated here.

www.thesolutionsjournal.com | Summer 2019 | Solutions | 29

T

he key causes and solutions to climate change are urban.

Urban businesses, residents, land uses, and the supply chains that support them emit approximately 70 percent of greenhouse gasses.1-2 Cities are well situated to mitigate their emissions because they have (relatively) functional governments (compared to, for example, nations), because they have wealth (they generate more than 70 percent of the world’s economy), and because they attract talented and motivated workers and residents.1-3 Cities, thus, have the motivation and the capacity to innovate climate solutions, and they are doing so around the world.3-4 Readers of this article will find two valuable lessons. First, the article describes a useful template—known as a Community Energy Plan—that other communities can use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as make their energy systems more secure, reliable, affordable. And, second, it illustrates a process— known as Collective Impact—that helps organize stakeholders to address complex adaptive problems such as climate mitigation.

Arlington, near Washington DC, is one of the most ethnically diverse, densely populated, highly educated, and wealthy urban municipalities in the United States. Its vision is to “be a diverse and inclusive world-class urban community with secure, attractive residential and commercial neighborhoods where people unite to form a caring, learning, participating, sustainable community in which each person is important.” Its applications of smart growth and transit-oriented development were celebrated and studied for more than 50 years and earned the US Environmental Protection Agency’s highest awards. It built on that momentum to produce an award-winning Community Energy Plan.5 The US Department of Energy uses Arlington as an illustrative case study of successful community energy planning.6

The Community Energy Plan seeks to enhance Arlington’s long-term economic competitiveness, energy security, and environmental quality, and, by 2050, cut per capita carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 75 percent from 2007 levels. Extensive and detailed documentation of the plan and strategies are published on Arlington’s website.7 The plan has six specific goals, each with supporting policies, strategies, tools, and metrics.

Key Concepts • Urban areas are key to climate mitigation and energy security. They have the motivation and the capacity to innovate climate solutions, and they are doing so around the world.

• A Community Energy Plan is a proven multipronged approach for communities to reduce emissions and make their energy system more secure, reliable, and affordable.

• Collective Impact is a proven approach for organizing and mobilizing multiple, diverser, and dispersed stakeholders.

• Arlington Virgina used a Collective Impact approach to devise and implement a Community Energy Plan to redesign its energy system and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 75 percent.

• Your community can do the same.

1. Increase energy efficiency of all buildings, not just public buildings. Strategies include incentivizing developers with density bonuses to encourage all new construction meets global standards for green buildings.

Arlington also developed programs encouraging energy reduction of existing building stock, including training energy retrofit contractors, promoting energy labels on appliances, and

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exchanging light bulbs. Targets include reducing per square foot energy use by 60 percent in nonresidential buildings and 55 percent for residential buildings by 2050, as compared to 2007 levels.

2. Increase local supply and efficiency of energy using combined heat and energy systems that connect building heating and cooling needs to electricity generation (because as much as 70 percent of energy in fuel used in energy production can be lost as heat). These district energy systems also increase energy security because local systems should still operate when regional power supplies are disrupted by events outside Arlington’s boarders.

3. Increase low-carbon energy options, particularly solar electric and hot water. Strategies include incentivizing developers to integrate solar into building designs and partnering with utilities to increase renewable energy powering the grid. To meet the summer peak demand for power and reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions, Arlington aims to have 160 megawatts of solar photovoltaics installed by 2050.

4. Reduce energy used in transportation by improving infrastructure and operations.

Strategies include promoting walkable, mixed-use development, multimodal transportation, and providing easy access to alternative fueling options that encourage use of lower carbon emitting vehicles.

Arlington is already a leader in smart growth transportation but seeks to further reduce the amount of carbon produced from transportation to 1.0 metric ton CO2 emissions per capita per year by 2050 from 3.7 mt in 2007.

Rich Dooley

Meeting with task force and community members.

5. Government operations will lead by example by setting and achieving targets that are at least as rigorous as those set for the broader community. Arlington seeks to integrate energy goals into all government activities by developing policies and allocating funding. Specifically, Arlington seeks to reduce government CO2 emissions by 76 percent by 2050, compared to 2007.

6. Reduce personal energy consumption by advocating and supporting behavior changes by, for example, providing residents and businesses with accessible, trusted information about energy and by hosting green games and energy events that inspire people and organizations to compete to reduce energy use.

Collective Impact Arlington’s process of developing its Community Energy Plan illustrates Collective Impact. The Collective Impact method provides a set of best practices for getting diverse people and organizations to collaborate in solving large-scale, complex, ill defined, wicked problems such as transforming a community’s energy system.8-9 Below we use aspects of Arlington’s process to illustrate key features of Collective Impact with the intent of helping other communities imagine how they might tackle their wicked challenges.

A Common Agenda: Stakeholders

must agree on a process, or agenda, for collaborating. The agenda requires commitment to work toward a shared understanding of the problem,

agreeing to initial goals and strategies, and developing indicators to which the actors hold themselves accountable. The goals, strategies, and resources typically are not known in advance. They emerge through collective vigilance, learning, and action facilitated by commitment to a carefully structured process. Stakeholders often need time to see that their own interests will be offered fair consideration and that decisions will be based on deliberation, evidence, and agreed upon principles rather than capricious criteria or, worse, political favoritism.

Developing trust can be a monumental challenge when stakeholders have previously been adversaries and/or come from different sectors with different expectations.

Arlington’s elected officials had been facilitating discussions about

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environmental issues for decades by advocating smart growth and other progressive efforts to improve quality of life, and following up those discussions with responsive governance.

These efforts created a trusted “holding space” for stakeholders to engage and for the Community Energy Plan to emerge. Officials used their networks and personal relationships to assemble stakeholders motivated to maintain Arlington’s reputation as a place attractive to businesses and residents who value quality of life and environmental quality. They wanted to sustain this distinction and thus differentiate Arlington from neighboring municipalities. A robust, transparent, and trusted process allowed stakeholders to engage with each other and share and shape visions about Arlington’s future. Ambiguous (and somewhat

Energy and Sustainability Task Force.

Task Force members represented a broad mix of community interests, including 29 organizations. “There are a large number of other stakeholders and members with a particular expertise to help us stretch and dig into an issue that is not normally on the plate of a local government,” Board Chairman Jay Fisette said when explaining its formation.10 The Task Force was joined and staffed by a team of consultants and Arlington government employees, who met every other month for 18 months, consulted experts, studied what other cities were doing, vetted proposals, and tailored a plan specific to Arlington’s political and environmental situation.

Attendance and commitment stayed high; it was rare that someone missed a meeting.

Many stakeholders must find ways to collaborate, innovate, and change business as usual. The Collective Impact method provides a set of best practices for coordinating such efforts.

controversial) terms such as sustainability and climate change were used in early discussions, but not in a way that was prescriptive. Stakeholders eventually agreed to more specific goals and strategies about energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental quality, which generated greater and more widespread commitment. Importantly, both the vision and solution were emergent and depended on a process and safe holding space that allowed stakeholders to rub their values and visions against one another and spark innovation and shared commitment to action.

A critical juncture in the process was the convening of an advisory council in 2010—The Community

Mutually Reinforcing Activities:

Stakeholders need clearly differentiated tasks that are coordinated to be mutually reinforcing. They need to know what their responsibilities are and how their individual roles meaningfully contribute to the larger outcome. Somewhat counterintuitively, stakeholders whose roles in the community are most similar to one another may find collaboration challenging because they compete territorially for ownership and recognition for their contributions. Another challenge that might arise is motivating stakeholders to carry out parts of the effort that, although necessary, do not receive ample public recognition and reward.

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Throughout Arlington’s planning process, efforts were made to identify and work across internal government silos such as departments and commissions responsible for transportation, housing, urban forestry, and environmental services, all of which had operations, policy mandates, or responsibilities with implications for energy policy. This level of interagency coordination proved difficult. After 18 months of work resulting in a draft Community Energy Plan, Arlington’s Planning Commission declined to adopt the document as official policy, in part, because it questioned how the plan would be integrated with Arlington’s existing activities and programs. The Task Force re-grouped and re-organized its plan with more detailed analysis, engagement from the Planning Commission, additional engagement with community groups, and better coordination across Arlington’s diverse government programs so that all stakeholders had clearer roles and greater commitment.

Organizations from civil society and business stepped into new roles. For example, Arlingtonians for a Clean Environment, a local NGO, took on the responsibility for managing a rebate program that incentivizes homeowners to implement residential energy efficiency improvements.11 It contracted with Arlington to administer, staff, market, and process homeowners’ rebate requests. And, starting in 1999, well before the Community Energy Plan efforts began, developers of new buildings utilized Arlington’s green building program, which gives density bonuses above what zoning allowed in exchange for constructing more energy efficient buildings.

This program evolved and became a cornerstone of the community energy plan, as commercial buildings account for half the energy Arlington consumes.12-13

Transparent Accounting Using Shared Metrics: Measurement is

where the rubber meets the road. It defines how success will be identified.

Precise, affordable, regular, and shared metrics help collaborators remain aligned, hold each other accountable, and learn from each other’s successes and failures.

Arlington set an overall carbon emissions target of 3.0 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per capita per year by 2050, which would be a reduction of nearly 75 percent from 2007 and comparable to global benchmark cities such as Copenhagen. Dozens of specific, measurable indicators were identified to gauge progress.

Milestones were set for 2020, 2040, and 2050.13-14 For example, for the strategy of increased energy efficiency in residential building stock, Arlington set milestones of reductions of 5 percent by 2020, 25 percent by 2030, 40 percent by 2040, and 55 percent by 2050 from 2007 levels. Indicators of other strategies have similarly specific measures and benchmarks. Arlington’s challenge has been measuring and reporting these indicators, in part because of the expense of doing so.

Backbone: Collective Impact requires

coordination of stakeholders.7 Coordination is not glamorous, plus it takes time and money, which few stakeholders can spare. Lack of a backbone infrastructure to support coordination is one of the most frequent reasons why multi-stakeholder collaborative efforts fail. Functions that must be performed include organizing and facilitating meetings, supporting technology and communications, collecting and reporting data, writing proposals for funding, conducting research and inviting experts, and handling the myriad logistical and administrative details needed for the initiative to function smoothly. Arlington’s government funded and staffed these critical backbone functions.

Community Energy Plan Document

Continuous Communication:

Consistent, open communication among stakeholders builds trust, clarifies objectives, creates motivation, and, importantly, promotes adjustments to goals and strategies as stakeholders share lessons they learn from their successes and failures. Arlington’s Energy Task Force developed an internal communication strategy designed to share information, questions, and decisions. For example, questions asked by or of the Task Force were meticulously recorded with attribution so that people could

remember what was asked and why it was asked. Subsequent answers or decisions were recorded and shared as a part of the public record. Arlington staff also worked hard to regularly meet with key stakeholders to share updates, solicit feedback, and keep everyone well informed. Over 100 public meetings served as another type of communication. Also, letters and written feedback were solicited from residents, stakeholder groups, and commissions. The Task Force also sought to publicize energy issues and Task Force efforts among residents. For

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instance, Task Force staff with a bevy of volunteers, marketed and staffed a life-sized game designed to educate people of all ages and backgrounds about energy issues. And, of course, Arlington maintained a website that displayed meeting minutes, resources, and now serves as a portal for anyone interested in specifics.

An Influential Champion: Collective

Impact is more likely to succeed when a champion (or small group of champions) commands the respect necessary to bring key stakeholders together and keeps them engaged over time. The champion must also have the courage to let the participants figure out the questions and answers themselves. Earlier efforts by Arlington to address climate-related issues were championed by Paul Ferguson former Chairman of the Arlington County Board and by County Manager Ron Carlee, but the energy planning effort was spearheaded by Jay Fisette during his term as Board Chair. All these champions used their networks and personal relationships to assemble and motivate the Task Force and other actors. Importantly, the tone they set was not hierarchical, with leaders imposing their vision, using position and charisma to persuade others to align. Rather, as is classic of Collective Impact processes, both the vision and solution were emergent and dependent on an open and transparent process.

Adequate Financial Resources:

Reliable funding for multiple years from at least one anchor funder is needed to support and mobilize other resources. In 2007, Arlington created a reliable funding source using a utility tax on residential customers of electricity and natural gas. To address regressivity of a tax, Arlington excludes from taxation the first 400 kWh of electricity usage and the first 20 CCF of natural gas usage. Arlington also remains the only jurisdiction in Northern Virginia that

does not impose a monthly minimum residential utility tax on consumers.

These exclusions result in a greater tax on heavy users while not penalizing residents that use less than average amounts of electricity and natural gas.

The tax has generated approximately $1.6 million per year. About $1M goes toward staff, $300k goes toward consultants, and the rest goes toward advancing energy efficiency improvements in government-owned facilities and paying for programs such as the Home Energy Rebates program. In the years since the energy tax began, Arlington has been able to leverage these funds with sources such as the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program.

2. Bloomberg, M & Pope, C. Climate of hope: how cities, businesses, and citizens can save the planet.

(Macmillian, NY 2017).

3. Florida, R. The new urban crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle class and what we can do about it.

(Hachette UK 2017) 4. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. Climate action in megacities 3.0: networking works, there is no global solution without local action. C40 and ARUP [online] (2015). http://www.cam3.c40.org/#/ main/home.

5. American Planning Association. National planning achievement awards 2014. [online] https://www. planning.org/awards/2014/achievement.htm.

6. US Department of Energy. Arlington County, Virginia: community energy plan. [online] https:// energy.gov/eere/slsc/arlington-county-virginiacommunity-energy-plan 7. Arlington County. Community energy plan [online] https://environment.arlingtonva.us/energy/ 8. Kania, J & Kramer, M. Collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review 9(1): 36-41 (2011).

The goals, strategies, and resources typically are not known in advance. They emerge through collective vigilance, learning, and action facilitated by commitment to a carefully structured process.

Conclusion Humanity faces wicked challenges such as climate change whose solutions exceed the capacities of individual organizations, even governments. Many stakeholders must find ways to collaborate, innovate, and change business as usual. The Collective Impact method provides a set of best practices for coordinating such efforts. We review above a few of those practices. Excellent resources exist to learn more. It is encouraging to see innovative local governments like Arlington, Virginia successfully addressing society’s most pressing issues.

9. Center for Community Health and Development, University of Kansas. Community Tool Box: Collective Impact [online] https://ctb.ku.edu/ en/table-of-contents/overview/models-forcommunity-health-and-development/collectiveimpact/main.

10. Arlington County Planning Commission Documents: Task Force minutes.

11. Arlington County Home Energy Rebate program. [online] https://environment.arlingtonva.us/energy/ rebates/.

12. Arlington County Green Building Bonus Density program. [online] https://environment.arlingtonva. us/energy/green-building/green-building-bonusdensity-program/.

13. Arlington County community energy plan implementation framework. [online] https://arlingtonva.s3.dualstack.us-east-1. amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/ sites/13/2015/08/Arlingtons-CEPImplementation-Framework.pdf.

14. Arlington community energy plan metrics

References 1. Barber, BR. Cool cities: urban sovereignty and the

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fix for global warming. (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2017).

baseline report. [online] https://arlingtonva. s3.dualstack.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/wpcontent/uploads/sites/13/2017/03/CEP-baselinemetrics-final.pdf

Arlington County Government

Arlington has clear smart growth boundaries that focus development near the underground metro. www.thesolutionsjournal.com | Summer 2019 | Solutions | 35

Pereira, L., Bennett, E., Biggs, R., Mangnus, A., Norström, A., Peterson, G., Raudsepp-Hearne, C., Sellberg, M., and J. Vervoort. (2019).

Seeding Change by Visioning Good Anthropocenes. Solutions 10(3): 36-43. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/seeding-change-by-visioning-good-anthropocenes

Feature

Seeding Change

by Visioning Good Anthropocenes

by Laura Pereira, Elena Bennett, Reinette Biggs, Astrid Mangnus, Albert Norström, Garry Peterson, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, My Sellberg, and Joost Vervoort

Artwork capturing the Seeds Visioning process from southern Africa in 2016

In Brief Although we are surrounded by dystopian stories about the age of the Anthropocene, the future does not have to be bleak. Seeds of alternative good futures occur in many places around the world and we can use these to help us think more creatively about pathways to more desirable futures in the Anthropocene. This paper describes the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes (SOGA) project that aims to identify where elements of Good Anthropocenes (‘seeds’) currently exist on the planet and how they can be used to help us envision pathways towards new, positive futures for the Earth and humanity. Each of the seeds is a potential solution that could help to shift us onto a more sustainable trajectory that will ensure both planetary and human wellbeing. The project has developed and combined novel visioning tools that engage a broad set of stakeholders in identifying potentially game-changing seed initiatives, and exploring how these could develop and combine to create radically alternative futures. This new scenario approach has been used in intergovernmental processes such as the UN Environment’s Global Environment Outlook (GEO) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). By tapping into creativity and ingenuity, the SOGA scenario process provides a set of methodological tools through which we can think in new ways about how to navigate towards more desirable futures, starting with the pockets of these futures that are already with us in the present.

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T

he Earth system is now arguably in a novel, uncertain planetary era—the Anthropocene—in which human activities are a major planetary force.1 These changes have largely been brought about through efforts to increase human wellbeing, particularly through conversion of land for food production and the extraction and use of fossil fuels.2 This situation leaves us confronted with the grand challenge of the Anthropocene: how can people create a fair, prosperous, and sustainable planet when many people remain poor, and the activities that have created the Anthropocene are the main ways in which we have alleviated poverty to date?

Although the challenge of achieving a just and sustainable planet is daunting, there is hope. People are increasingly responding to the Anthropocene challenge with new ways of living that could contribute to the creation of a more prosperous, equitable, and just world—A Good Anthropocene.3 We call these actions ‘seeds’ and define them as existing initiatives that are not widespread or well-known. These can include social movements, new technologies, economic tools, or social-ecological projects that appear to be making a substantial contribution towards creating a future that is just, prosperous, and sustainable.

There are many examples of new thinking, new ways of living, and new ways of connecting people and nature that address aspects of global problems, which could create different trajectories of future change. For example, there are groups reimagining the smart city concept and reshaping how urban citizens move around and reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprints; groups trying radically to reinvent finance for a greener world; people trying to reconnect human and ecological health; and many others (See Box 1 for some more in-depth examples). Indeed, the future does not have to be bleak.

On the global scale, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer a set of aspirations for a more sustainable planet, but the pathways towards achieving these in an integrated way remains open. Although individuals, organizations and governments have repeatedly stated their desires and are even taking steps to create a better world, there is little agreement in the scientific or activist community on

Key Concepts • We need new, positive and inspiring stories and visions of the future • Seeds—innovations and experiments at the margins—can be a source of inspiration • We can develop radically alternative, novel and positive future visions for the Earth and humanity by combining different seeds and exploring their implications • Connecting entrepreneurs behind different seeds can foster learning and collaborations that can help catalyze larger scale transformation • There are a variety of diverse methods and approaches that can be combined to create transformative spaces within which actors can participate in inspirational visioning that can turn into action • Creativity and new ways of thinking and doing are critical to fostering new trajectories for the Earth and humanity

to create a good Anthropocene create a worse Anthropocene for someone else in another location, at another time, or with a different concept of what is ‘good’.

One method to help explore more positive futures and different potential pathways for achieving them is through scenario development.4 While scenarios are a prominent feature of the global scientific community (IPCC, MA, GEO, etc.), there have been very few analyses of radically positive futures or how to achieve them from diverse perspectives. Those positive futures that do exist tend to follow a similar set of pathways that overestimate the power of mainstream strategies to bring about radical change.3 This opens up three challenges for the scenario community: 1) scoping different perspectives on what would constitute a ‘Good Anthropocene’, 2) pushing the boundaries of conventional thinking to imagine positive futures that are radically different from the world today to help motivate transformative change, and 3) exploring what deeper structural changes may be needed in our politics, economies and societies to achieve a more desirable future. The Seeds of Good Anthropocenes Project aims to address these challenges by developing positive futures of the Anthropocene from a diversity of perspectives that inspire and empower people to start realizing them. The goal is that these visions need to be creative, innovative and transformative and operate across levels—from the local to the global.

Project Description the details of what constitutes a good Anthropocene and how to bring it about. This may be due to the complexity and scale of change required, because different people’s understanding of what is ‘good’ can diverge, because our sense of the right pathways to a good end are not the same, or because efforts that work in one context might not work in others. Indeed, sometimes, actions taken by one group

In this paper, we present insights from an ongoing research initiative, “Seeds of Good Anthropocenes” (SOGA) that is at the forefront of approaches for imagining, exploring and creating more positive futures in the Anthropocene.

The rationale underlying the project is that the current predominance of dystopic visions about the future—climate change, population booms, biodiversity loss, increased

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Box 1 In this box, we outline four examples of projects from the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes (SOGA) database that are being undertaken to bring about a better Anthropocene.

Yachay City of Knowledge Yachay City of Knowledge is a “New City” under development in rural Ecuador. “New Cities” are planned cities, usually designed and constructed in partnership between government and corporate actors. They represent a vision of the future—new ways of people living together and relating to one another and the environment, with innovations to support this vision designed into the landscape and infrastructure.

Yachay is conceptualized to be a technological research and innovation hub containing research facilities, a working university, and bio-tech companies. Because Yachay is located in one of the most biodiverse regions of the planet, nature, green spaces and biodiversity are being integrated into city plans in various ways. Approaches to sustainable development of the city include the use of locally recycled resources such as waste products from palm oil refineries for foot paths; bamboo for fences; recycled shipping pallets for fences and flower beds; adobe clay for paths and benches; and reclaimed wood for buildings.

Despite Yachay’s aspirations, its development has been hindered by a downturn in Ecuador’s national economy, and a lack of resources threatens its vision as an innovation hub of the South. But Yachay hopes to bring Ecuador sustainable economic development as well as make the country a model of experimentation, innovation, and learning.

endangered. The government estimates that invasive predators cost the country over 3 Billion NZ dollars per year due to damage to agriculture, with additional impacts on cultural identity and tourism.

The goals of Predator Free NZ are unprecedented in global conservation. In an age of global movement of plants and animals, eradicating all invertebrate predators is a massive endeavour, especially in a country the size of New Zealand, with a large proportion of humandominated ecosystems. While the technical challenges of the job are being met with innovations in science and technology, the social and political challenges are perhaps even more substantial. Killing and monitoring animals over a large area requires substantial public consensus and political support and a new common vision of the relationship between people and nature. In New Zealand, this requires connecting government plans with Māori goals for environmental management and restoration, as well as with the needs of people living and working in agricultural and urban areas. The plan has the potential to spur residents to reappraise their relationships with nature, and specifically with endemic plants and animals.

This seed is globally relevant, because the negative impacts of invasive species are a substantial problem in all parts of the world. In New Zealand the plan is for this seed to grow from isolated islands to larger islands and eventually the mainland.

Canadian Tribal Parks “Tribal parks” are an example of Indigenous Peoples asserting their rights to govern and use land in their own way without the prior approval of a national government. In Canada, some tribal parks have been converted into recognized co-managed national parks (e.g. Gwai Hannas national Park) while others exist in a legal grey area where they have partnerships with some levels of government but are not formally recognized by others (e.g. Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Park).

Tribal parks are interesting because they represent a novel way to incorporate traditional and historical values and Indigenous Knowledge Systems into the protection of ecosystems. They have been asserted not by colonial states, but by colonized people who have historically been displaced by the state. By enhancing the diversity of land ownership and land governance systems, these tribal parks can potentially provide opportunities for experimentation and learning that can benefit broader society and nature. Due to historical treaty rights, aboriginal lands represent places where different norms and rules apply within a country, and where different activities are practiced. These differences provide places where people and nature can interact in diverse ways and potentially provide lessons on social-ecological management that are relevant elsewhere.

Foundation for Ecological Security The Foundation for Ecological Security is an Indian NGO that works to reduce poverty by helping communities organize to restore their ecosystems and enhance their livelihoods. Activities are founded on the idea that improving management of ecological commons is a key pathway out of poverty. The Foundation works with over 8000 village institutions in 31 districts across eight states to promote collaborative self-governance, and equal access of women and poor to decision making. To date, they have supported the restoration of over 1 million hectares of degraded forest, rangeland, and wetlands. The Foundation has also developed programmes and material that have been used to train 350,000 people in ecological restoration and management of village institutions.

The Foundation believes that communities are not passive recipients of the programmes designed to benefit them. By assisting communities in mapping the complexities of natural resource management and in articulating their common concerns, community driven processes become central to efforts that shape and use government policies and programmes for conserving natural resources. They have created a network of partners that includes different levels of government, international NGOs, local and international universities and local stakeholders.

The Foundation for Ecological Security is continuing to grow and increase its impact, but its level of community empowerment, its networked organization and its adaptive management methods could be used as a model for other groups working on poverty reduction issues.

Predator Free New Zealand Predator Free New Zealand 2050 is a plan being implemented by the New Zealand government to eliminate all invasive vertebrate predators to protect New Zealand’s rare endemic species, 80 percent of which are

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inequality—makes it very difficult to imagine how the world could work differently and inspire solutions towards achieving radical change. Identifying positive and inspirational initiatives that already exist, and exploring the kinds of futures they might help create, can empower people to think and act in ways that start creating these more positive futures.

In order to achieve its overall goal, the SOGA project has four interconnected objectives: 1. Identify and collect in a database a diverse range of ‘seeds,’ (e.g. initiatives, organisations, projects, technologies, networks) that have high potential to contribute to Good Anthropocenes; 2. Analyze the features of initiatives with high transformative potential, the contexts that best support these initiatives, and their cross-scale interactions; 3. Develop methods for building more diverse, positive scenarios that push the limits of current thinking and build on the seeds in the database, to imagine radical transformative change across local, regional and global levels; 4. Convene the change-makers behind the seeds to create new connections and help catalyse large scale transformations; and 5. Explore the systemic structural features of today’s world that need to be addressed to facilitate transformative change, and enable current innovative initiatives to grow and flourish.

A key aspect of all five aims is a high level of engagement with people outside academia because of the recognition that transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration is vital to achieving transformative change.

For example, seeds were collected in a series of participatory workshops in Southern Africa, and elsewhere, as well as online. In a parallel process,

Laura Pereira

Coalitions of seeds being negotiated at the PECS conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa in November 2015

discussions about how to help people think more creatively led to the use of game design for developing scenarios.

The project also involved experimenting with tools and methods to get people to think differently and more positively about the future. Over the duration of the project, several events took place where the team could experiment with different processes for collecting seeds, developing creative narratives of the future, and facilitating new connections amongst the innovators behind the seeds. Here, we reflect on these participatory processes.

Description of Participatory Methodological Approaches Using Seeds A central goal of the project is to use seeds as starting points for envisioning radically alternative scenarios of Good Anthropocenes. The ‘seeds’-based scenario approach responds to the need to avoid creating purely dystopian, utopian or business-as-usual futures, and the need to imagine futures that are at once truly novel, as well as concrete

enough to inspire practical action.5 The scenario approach being piloted is specifically aimed at better imagining emergent change.

The SOGA project has implemented a range of different approaches for scenario creation, including basic narrative development, live role playing games, the three horizons framework and others (Table 1).

These different approaches have been implemented in different versions at workshops, scientific conferences, with communities of innovative initiatives and with students to develop seed-based scenarios. Rather than pre-designing a given incarnation of a seed scenario development approach, a co-design process has also been piloted, where in a workshop format the participants conceptualize and experiment with how to best represent how seeds interact with their contexts and each other (by designing game or other interaction rules). This co-production approach allows for conversations about the nature of transformative change in the face

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Processes used for scenario creation

Source of seeds

Use of seeds

Anthropocene challenges or surprises

Governance and socio-economic conditions

Degree of process co-design/ adaptation, iteration

Basic narrative development

Pre-existing seeds from database

Individual seeds

Not explicitly considered

Not explicitly considered

Pre-designed process: one round

Live role playing game for embodied futuring

New seeds—the process doubles as a way to collect seeds

Combining multiple seeds within the focus area (e.g. local seeds)

Anthropocene challenges as scenario building blocks

Some participants take roles as regime actors

Pre-designed process: multiple rounds with different conditions

Futures Wheels to explore what the implications are for seeds that have matured

Either existing seeds or using three seeds decided on by the group

Seeds are described in their ‘mature condition’ AND used as starting points to think about the implications of these seeds for social, technological, environmental, economic, political and values dimensions.

Not explicitly considered

The implications for how the seeds in a mature state impact these conditions are described

Pre-designed process with a single round

Cross-impact analysis to Pre-selected or seeds explain how seeds could decided on by the interact with each other group

Three (or more) seeds are combined in a matrix to form new seeds

Not explicitly considered

Not explicitly considered

Pre-designed process

Mash-up to understand how seeds could combine under certain conditions

Pre-existing seeds from the database or new seeds suggested by the group

Two seeds are combined or ‘mashedup’ into a novel idea or initiative

Challenges related to the Anthropocene can be brought in or addressed at any point in the process, especially to challenge thinking of how to deal with surprise

Seeds need to fit within a particular scenario, e.g. technological pathway

Space for the participants to redesign the process through different rounds

Three horizons for pathway development

Brainstorm of seeds as the process emerges (Seeds are used as ‘weak signals’ of the future)

Combination of seeds into a future desirable future (third horizon)

The first horizon explores existing dominant structures, trends and processes that could ‘lock-in’ current Anthropocene trajectories

Narratives about changing governance conditions as required for seeds

The three horizons framework is a heuristic tool that can be adapted for different needs

Wildcards

Wildcards can be seeds chosen by experts as the most novel or relevant for a particular group

Seeds are used as additional factors for groups to have to consider during their narrative building

Wildcards are introduced as surprises by the facilitator to disrupt the group and extend their creative thinking.

A wildcard could refer to a seed that has led to a specific socioeconomic or political event (good or bad) such as a financial crisis or the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet earlier than anticipated

This can be used at any point to stimulate more radical discussions in a group and to test how resilient the future world is to surprise or whether the wildcard has already been incorporated in some way in the discussion.

Food Policy Council game where players play a food policy council combining seeds to achieve city-level food outcomes

A mix of seeds from within and outside the focus region; precollected

Participants received standard budget to be spent on combing seed elements into new initiative

Scenarios introduced as event cards based on rolling dice

Participants themselves played dominant regime actors

Can be adapted according to participants’ interests, e.g. the introduction of different rounds with increasing budgets or modifications to the rules at each round

Table 1. An overview of different methodological processes that can be combined in various ways in order to design an appropriate workshop process 40 | Solutions | Summer 2019 | www.thesolutionsjournal.com

of the Anthropocene, as well as providing an open approach to incorporating inter– and transdisciplinary perspectives into scenario building methods.5 One particularly useful approach that we have modified and adapted to develop scenarios from seeds is the Three Horizons framework. The ‘Three Horizons’ is a graphical framework for thinking about what currently dominates the world and how it can change.6 The currently existing patterns of the first horizon, shift to fundamentally new patterns of the third horizon, through a period of transition in the second horizon. In this process we: 1. Identify a set of disparate set of seeds that currently exist at the margins.

2. Imagine a world in which these seeds have grown from the margins and interacted to be a dominant feature of society.

3. This vision is then refined by looking backwards to the present and imagining what dimensions of our present world would have to become less important and what would need to increase for this world to occur.

4. This then leads to a consideration of the pathways to get from the present to the future and the conflicts between the growth of the seeds and the decline of the parts of the existing world with which they are in tension (i.e the transition of the 2nd horizon).

5. Finally, we identify what types of enabling conditions would be necessary to enable the conflicts and crises identified in step four to be resolved in a way that achieves a world in which the seeds can grow and interact in a desirable way. These insights can be used to create rich, multi-dimensional descriptions of sustainability transitions from today to the future.

Figure 1. Three horizons framework and the five steps The relevance of the seeds approach has also been highlighted by international assessment bodies, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) run by UN Environment.7,8 Each of these assessment processes have been tasked with implementing more novel and policy-relevant scenario processes.9-11 IPBES used the seeds scenario approach in a nature futures workshop in Auckland, New Zealand that brought together an international group of stakeholders interested in the future of the Earth’s biodiversity in order to create positive visions that could inspire decision-makers and inform modelling processes.7 In the GEO 6 process, the seeds approach was used to create an ‘innovative’ outlook section that talked to the environmental policy makers that commissioned the report.8 Each of these processes has been informed by the theory underlying the SOGA project- that existing positive initiatives exist now that if brought together in interesting ways, could chart a more positive future for the planet.

Solution-Oriented Outcomes

These workshop interventions have resulted in some inspiring and innovative solutions to global challenges.

One of the key thematic focus points of the project has been around creating positive food futures, and two seeds-based workshops have been run with this in mind- one in Stockholm and the other in Kyoto (Box 2 and 3).

These examples highlight how the seeds approach can shed new light on how to confront wicked and complex global sustainability challenges.

The global food system represents a nexus of wicked sustainability challenges: it needs to feed a burgeoning human population while staying within planetary boundaries related to climate change, biodiversity loss and nutrient cycles, as well as addressing

issues of malnutrition, and safety risks such as antibiotic resistance. Clearly, we need a substantial change—a transformation—of the global food system. While some features of this transformation have been articulated (e.g. shifting to vegetarian diets and cutting food waste), it remains unclear how actually to realize this transformation. The seeds approach allowed us to explore visions of food system transformations that are plausible and grounded in local realities.

Differences and similarities in the perceptions of what such transformations can or should look like have been unearthed. For example, some key food system actors may see sustainable food systems characterized by seasonally adapted diets and geographically limited trade with

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Box 2: Stockholm The workshop in Stockholm was a one-day event held on Oct 6th 2017 organized by researchers at Stockholm Resilience Centre. Its aim was to articulate alternative positive food futures for the Stockholm-Mälaren region. The 21 participants were from municipalities, civil society initiatives, farmer associations, business startups, and research organizations in the region—all wanting change to sustainable food systems, but with different ideas of what that means.

Because of the short time frame, only the first step of the Manoa Mash-up12 for participatory visioning (Table 1) was performed. Each participant brought a seed, their own or someone else’s that they were inspired by. The participants were divided into small, but diverse groups, and 1) presented their seeds, 2) created futures wheels, 3) made collages of what the future food system in the region could look like, and 4) shared their ideas among the groups. An artist captured the discussions during the workshop. There was also practical inspiration in the breaks, through the meals prepared by a chef renowned for sustainable gastronomy, and examples of sustainable farming practices at the farm where the workshop venue was situated.

The workshop succeeded in fostering new connections among different actors engaged in sustainable food in the region. There were clear common themes among the groups, and these were captured in one common vision for the region and illustrated by the artist. The vision was presented, together with a set of discussion questions around what a positive future is and how to get there, at a food systems conference in the region. In a next step, the researchers conducted a survey among an extended group of regional food actors, including the workshop participants, to clarify potential conflicts between different values in the vision, as well as common priorities and opportunities for new collaboration projects.

Laura Pereira

During a side event preceding the UN Environment Assembly in December 2017, groups of interested stakeholders used a seeds approach to help come up with strategies for achieving the SDGs

neighboring countries. Others may hold a more global perspective and focus more on agricultural production at scales to make food affordable globally. It has been important to highlight the diverse cultural values around food systems—e.g. valuing cultural landscapes with biodiversity aided by grazing animals versus a vegan diet with no animal products and therefore a lower environmental footprintbecause, despite such differences, there might be several points of agreement. Importantly, these tensions and synergies are mashed together in the seeds process and are central in generating a vision of the future that is made up of multiple perspectives and trends and reveals overlapping goals.

Next steps There are several interesting potential next steps for this project, including further development of the scenario approach; development of a project ‘theory of change’; and exploration of

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how the various seeds in our database are—or are not—successful at bringing about transformation of their situation to a better Anthropocene. Key next steps include trying new contexts that have sometimes been problematic for scenario development, including developing scenarios with indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups, and with individuals that have contrasting ideas of what would be ‘good’ in a good Anthropocene. We have also experienced the positive, idea-sharing aspect of bringing together seed changemakers to share insights about what works and what are barriers—everything from managing local politics to organizational strategy to financial resources. This could be further supported to inspire and help increase the ability of these entrepreneurs to bring about positive transformation by developing new collaborative projects through a seeds network.

SOGA would like to build a seeds network to mobilize collective action

Box 3: Kyoto

Laura Pereira

At the SESNYC visioning workshop in May 2019, one group had to use coloured string to connect different aspects of their future wheels together

and explore how the seeds could be scaled up in different ways to achieve transformative change, in particular those that can help in achieving an integrated set of SDGs. A critical aspect will be to continue to learn through the research and reflect on the project process as it evolves and takes on new shapes.

Acknowledgements The project is funded by Future Earth in conjunction with the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS) and ecoSERVICES, with contributions from the GRAID (Guidance for Resilience in the Anthropocene: Investments for Development) project and also supported by the DST/ NRF South African Research Chairs Initiative.

References 1. Steffen, W, Crutzen, PJ, & McNeill, JR. The

2. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems And Human Well-Being: Synthesis (Island Press, Washington D.C, 2005).

3. Bennett, EM et al. Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14, 441–448 (2016).

4. Van Vuuren, DP, Kok, MTJ, Girod, B, Lucas, PL, & de Vries, B. Scenarios in global environmental assessments: key characteristics and lessons for future use. Global Environmental Change 22, 884–895 (2012).

5. Pereira, LM et al. in Urban Planet (eds. Elmqvist, T. et al.) (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018).

6. Sharpe, B, Hodgson, A, Leicester, G, Lyon, A, & Fazey, I. Three Horizons: A pathways practice for transformation. Ecology and Society 21, (2016).

7. Lundquist, CJ et al. Visions For Nature And Nature’s Contributions To People For The 21st Century (Auckland, New Zealand, 2017).

8. Pereira, L et al. in Global Environment Outlook (GEO 6) (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New

The aim of the series of focus groups and workshops in Kyoto was to test how innovative urban food practices can benefit from collecting, exploring and combining such practices with relevant actors from the field. For the Kyoto case, the “seeds” participants were based in Kyoto prefecture and engaged in social activity that pursues idealist future goals with regards to the food system.

They engaged in a mixed-methods research design of semi-structured visioning interviews, back-casting focus groups and workshops consisting of a digital game and a card-based live roleplaying game (Table 1). The different methods enabled the participants to share and combine their experiences and visions of the future. For example, the card game consisted of a deck of cards with seed initiatives from Kyoto, Japan and the world. The participants were tasked with combining these seeds and supporting them through the creation of a Food Policy Council.

This added an extra framework for experimentation with the seed ideas and what governance mechanisms are necessary to enable these seeds to grow and interact positively.

The outputs of the exercise were both the scenarios that were generated by the participants, but also how the process itself motivated action, the establishment of a network of changemakers, and increased understanding of urban food systems from multiple perspectives. Together, the outcomes were expected to lead to new or extended imaginaries, which are the deep-seated modes of understanding that constitute the social and political space through which people perceive, judge and act towards the future.

York, 2019).

9. Kok, MTJ et al. Biodiversity and ecosystem services require IPBES to take novel approach to scenarios.

Sustainability Science 12, 177–181 (2016).

Intergovernmental Scientific Scenario Processes,

10. Rosa, IMD et al. Multiscale scenarios for nature futures. Nature Ecology and Evolution 1, 1416–1419

Elementa Science of the Anthropocene, Accepted.

12. Pereira, LM, Hichert, T, Hamann, M, Preiser, R, & Biggs,

(2017).

11. Pereira, LM, Sitas, N, Ravera, F, Jimenez-Aceituno, A,

R. Using futures methods to create transformative

Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the

& Merrie, A. Building capacities for transformative

spaces: visions of a good Anthropocene in southern

great forces of Nature? Ambio 36, 614–621 (2007).

change towards sustainability: Imagination in

Africa. Ecology and Society 23, (2018).

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Van den Brule, J. (2019). Climate Consciousness: Artist Kito Mbiango on the Power of Art to Drive Action on Climate Change. Solutions 10(3): 44-51. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/climate-consciousness-artist-kito-mbiango-on-the-power-of-art-to-drive-action-on-climate-change

Feature

Climate Consciousness Artist Kito Mbiango on the Power of Art to Drive Action on Climate Change

by Jill Van den Brule

W

e have a climate emergency. Regardless of where one stands on this issue—this is our ‘inconvenient truth’. Yet the power to reach people has never been greater. Close to 3.2 Billion people today are online, about 2 Billion are from developing countries and over 89 million from least developed countries.1 Our currency today lies is in our culture, our capacity for mass mobilization and in the immense untapped power of our global neural network. We can literally put our heads and hearts together on this one! Yet, why do the majority seem paralyzed by the daunting challenge of tackling climate change? How do we move humanity beyond the denial and doom? How do we begin making changes in our daily lives to help us all not only thrive but literally survive? We are on the verge of extinction. Humanity has wiped out 60 percent of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, and the world’s experts warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens our very civilisation.2 It is getting harder to deny the truth that our consumption patterns are directly responsible for what’s happening. The biggest cause of wildlife losses is the destruction of natural habitats, much of it to create

farmland to support our lifestyles.

Those of us tapped into the truth have a moral obligation to educate others about this crisis and get them to act. We desperately need a climate culture—a means by which we engage, communicate and create solutions to live sustainably. Culture gives us a language that transcends barriers and enables us to communicate about these issues within our families, communities and with our indigenous elders. When we look at certain indigenous cultures, such as the Inuit people, for example, we see they have over 50 words for snow.3 Linguists explain that this kind of linguistic diversity, demonstrates how languages evolve to suit the needs of their speakers. “These people need to know whether ice is fit to walk on or whether you will sink through it,” says linguist Willem de Reuse, “It’s a matter of life or death.”4 Our culture however, does not seem to have caught up with our environmental reality. There is a dire need support and accelerate this process, says Mbiango. Culture as we refer to it here is defined as ‘a way of life of a group of people—the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation

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to the next.’ Culture is symbolic communication. So why are we not moving more swiftly on the climate agenda? Why are Europe’s youth taking to the streets demanding change while the rest of society seems to be moving so sluggishly?

It is said that we are experiencing “climate or ecological grief’5 which captures the feelings of loss, anger, hopelessness, despair and distress caused by climate change and ecological decline. This feeling of loss is impacting our psyches and mental health, but also making many realize that this means we will all need to make changes in our lifestyles and eating habits, which can lead to further denial and paralysis. In addition, “climate change and environmental movements have long been criticised for trying to motivate the population through negative narratives and doomsday scenarios and we have seen much of the movement shift in recent years towards more positive narratives of climate hope,” explains Rob Law in his recent OpEd in the Guardian.6

Climate Hope and the Timeless Power of Art In turbulent times we often turn to the artists and creatives to nurture our inner selves and help us construct and imagine new realities. Artists have been using the power of art

Kito Mbiango

Climate Change Collection #11

for climate action for centuries. The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai (c. 1829–33) has been interpreted as a warning about tsunami risk. In an era of increasing natural disasters, art can communicate the future risks we face and inspire people to think about disaster risk and resilience in ways that science, data and numbers cannot. As Leonardo DaVinci said “Art is the queen of all sciences, communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.” Art and culture thus have an immense role to play in educating and mobilising civil society towards climate action. “When we look around our cities, we are bombarded with ads for consumer and luxury products—this push to consume, observes Mbiango, is what has created this climate disaster to begin with. In his view, we need to use similar tools and thinking

Why the Climate Change Collection?

to reverse this trend, impelling people to collective action. “We are missing the visual and cultural language needed to communicate about the climate, which can empower families, communities and influencers to demand change and resources from their policymakers and governments,” says Mbiango. At its core, it is about reminding us of our organic unity—and about respect, reverence and love,” he says.

Mbiango’s work speaks nostalgically to our primal intelligence, engaging us in a conscious reflection about our collective evolution. His “Climate Change Collection” is a response to the accelerating environmental degradation we are facing and have imposed upon nature and all wildlife. The artist’s goal with this collection is to shift the traditional climate change narrative of impending doom, to a more positive one of reverence and deeper reflection through ‘embodied cognition.’ In this series, he invites viewers to experience these aweinspiring feelings of interconnectedness with nature through his vivid, interposed imagery. In doing so, he seeks to spark conversations across generations and geographies to spur collective action and draw attention to the dire need for restoring balance with nature.

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Kito Mbiango

Climate Change Collection #1

Mbiango lived in the Congo as a child, it is where he first became conscious of the environmental degradation and exploitation of resources affecting his father’s people and land. Through his work, he also aims to engage young people in this vital discussion, for they are the leaders whose climate consciousness needs to be nurtured.

Mbiango finds inspiration in esoteric concepts, vintage photographs and scientific illustrations. He transforms this material into a new language in which colors, textures and geometry are used to reflect the eternal dance between man, woman and nature. He implicitly understands the importance of finding a visual voice or resonance. He does so by a focused meditation on a particular theme. He

then transfers and blends symbols and images onto fabric, canvas, wood and recycled materials. Each medium he uses involves meticulous studies of layering and light, evoking ancestral spirits and voyages through time.

Rooted in Social Justice Every conceivable culture in which the artist feels he can trace himself finds its way into his musings, keeping his practice in a constant state of growth and experimentation. The sensitivity of his work stems from Mbiango’s African roots—his father was President of the Supreme Court of Congo while his mother was a nurse.

His grandmother, a master in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging was a major influence. They shared

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a passion for geology and collecting minerals together when he was young. This rich cultural exposure led to a deep veneration for the land, indigenous wisdom and how it should inform our collective future. He pays tribute to timelessness—where imagination and reality intersect.

Mbiango divides his time between Brussels, New York and Miami. He has mastered his own technique utilizing multiple production methods, including image transfer and mixed media assemblage, applied meticulously by hand. His body of work explores themes encompassing memory, history and socio-political realities.

Reflecting a collective yearning for transcendence, his universal tapestries excite the imagination by crossing

Kito Mbiango

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and blurring cultural borders between Eastern and Western spheres of influence.

The Artist as Futurist— Towards a Collective Consciousness Mbiango’s work is informed by a deep passion for innovative thinking and the work of futurists like Elon Musk, Buckminster Fuller and theologist Theillard de Chardin who set down the philosophical framework for planetary, net-based consciousness over 50 years ago. Chardin foresaw the development of the internet, but described it as a “noosphere”—literally, “mind-sphere” or a thinking layer containing the collective consciousness of humanity which will envelope the earth. He realized that everything around him was beautifully connected in one vast,

pulsating web of divine life. He likened this global infrastructure to “a generalized nervous system” that was giving the human species an “organic unity.”

His artistic practice reflects these rich notions of human connection emerging.

In Mbiango’s view, mirrors—are the means through which we see ourselves. However, mirrors, he argues exist in our minds as well. ‘Mirror neurons’ fire in our brains when a person acts and another person observes the same action being performed by someone else. This act is connected to our own human evolution. Modeling the behavior of others is how we learn. Studies have shown that similar physiological changes occur when we are observing art. When one looks at a profound piece of art, neuroscientist have demonstrated that we are firing

similar neurons as the artist when they created it—thus paving new neural pathways and stimulating a state of inspiration which the artist experienced while making the work.

This sense of being drawn into a work of art is called “embodied cognition.”

This is why he creates as he does.

Regenerative Approaches and the Physics of Interconnectedness Mbiango’s artistic practice is also informed by science, as the artist begins his creative process through inquiry and focused study, observing patterns and gaps between visual and scientific thought across cultures and traditions. He then intuitively incorporates elements of ancient knowledge, through imagery and symbols, which form part of his vast archives. This

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Kito Mbiango

Climate Change Collection #13

organic weaving of ideas, materials and processes creates indefinable works that are emotive and thought provoking because they deliberately transcend recognized classifications.

He recognizes the need for a massive shift in consciousness catalyzed by our shared culture. These new approaches are about “using the very principles of nature to reorganize our society around human values of equality, sustainability and sense of community, says Jeroen van Dijk, Dutch researcher in process physics7 and consciousness. It’s about helping reshape our economy so that it starts following the principles of sustainable ecological networks. This regenerative approach is rather different from the current nature-exhausting method of ‘overconsumption-based capitalism’, which tends to drain, deplete and undermine its own resources.” “This approach, van Dijk explains, basically models reality as a giant network of mutually related activity patterns that, on multiple levels (i.e., the microcosmic, mesocosmic and macrocosmic

level) that will spontaneously selforganize into a neural network-like manner.” In essence, this thinking provides scientific evidence of the interdependence of our systems and the need for solutions to take regenerative approaches into account.

Envisioning a Culture of Sustainability While humanity grapples with new models of sustainable consumption, Mbiango considers quantum leaps in understanding through art. It begins with creating a culture for our climate, which is evolving and dying as we are. As Anjuli Pandit UK Head of Corporate Sustainability at BNP Parisbas has observed, climate change is missing from mainstream culture.

“It’s not reflected in art, fashion, movies, music or in museums and public spaces.

It’s a subject matter, missing from culture altogether although the materials used to create everything we consume, including art, all come from natural sources—all of which are also dying.” The beauty of Mbiango’s pieces are that they mix the

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social with the environmental conversation on climate change. It evokes heritage and tradition as well as natural beauty,” she underlines. Art emotionally, socially and biologically brings us together to fuse a spark of empathetic connection that drives us to unite to create social change. Mbiango’s mission, first and foremost, is one of creation—driving us to connect to the essence of what makes us human.

His hope is to inspire partnerships, which continue to move local communities and citizens to take action in protecting the planet.

Mbiango has been recognized for his pioneering work by The Institute for the Future, Palo Alto and his work has served to support global advocacy across the private and public sectors including with: BNP Parisbas, Women Deliver, The World Bank’s Climate Investment Fund (CIF), UNICEF, UN Women, Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation the David Lynch Foundation and the World Economic Forum. His artwork has also been acquired by various corporate and private collections.

Kito Mbiango

Climate Change Collection #21

Creating a Culture for Climate…

Achieving this change isn’t as daunting as it seems, it’s about integrating the climate conversation into our daily lingo, the way we do discussions on social class and race. It’s about engaging artists and creatives worldwide to: • Write climate change into your movie scripts • Sing, rap and chant it into your lyrics • Tell the stories of climate refugees in your comedy shows/sitcoms • Include traces of what we are losing within your fabrics • Design it into your latest fashion • Reflect it in your art and in all creative industries, so that the climate is at the heart of our culture

Mbiango leads by example and is relentless in his quest to spread awareness about climate change.

He recently took his activism to the streets on digital screens across New York City and in the iconic Oculus in the World Trade Centre. He hopes to incite waves of change by getting others of all ages and backgrounds to bring their creativity and passion in support of the climate movement.

Developing a culture of climate is the key to our evolution. If we succeed in making this cultural shift, then we stand a chance of regenerating our planet and creating a more peaceful and sustainable earth for us all.

References 1. Global Internet Usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Global_Internet_usage 2. “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds, The Guardian, October 2018.” https://bit.ly/2zeE9MT 3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimowords-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2beee-6e38f5215402_story.html?utm_term=. c4117c73db8a 4. ibid.

5. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/ may/09/i-have-felt-hopelessness-over-climatechange-here-is-how-we-move-past-the-immensegrief 6. ibid.

7. Process physics has been developed by the Australian professor of physics Reginald Cahill and his team. For more info please see: http://www. flinders.edu.au/science_engineering/caps/research/ physics/process-physics/home.cfm

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Climate Change Collection #2 50 | Solutions | Summer 2019 | www.thesolutionsjournal.com

Kito Mbiango

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Ford, O. G. (2019). Review of Show Up Hard: A Road Map for Helpers in Crisis by Shannon Weber, MSW. Solutions 10(3): 52-53. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/review-of-show-up-hard-a-road-map-for-helpers-in-crisis-by-shannon-weber-msw

Reviews Book Review

Review of Show Up Hard: A Road Map for Helpers in Crisis

by Shannon Weber, MSW

By Olivia G. Ford

W

“

hat if your job is not to be right or knowledgeable,” Shannon Weber, MSW, asks readers; “What if your role is to create change?”

Weber herself employs this question as a kind of magnetic North to realign with her core purpose when she feels “stuck” in her practice of Showing Up Hard. Simply put, to Show Up Hard as a leader is to support others through profound challenges in ways that are sustainable, that do not subsume or alienate the helper. “Leaders commit to the emotional labor of showing up to support change,” Weber writes.

“Imagining oneself as a hero is easy: Fly in and save the day. Showing up when no one is watching, when the stakes are less high, when the task at hand is not as attractive—this is the work of creating change.”

Show Up Hard: A Road Map for Helpers in Crisis is an intimate, interactive conversation between Weber and her readers, whom she addresses with the assumption that we are all leaders.

A leader is defined in the text as anyone who is in a position to illuminate a path forward, who attends to even one other person’s wellbeing, or who can potentially guide someone else to a better place. Still, many of the examples illustrating tools and techniques of Showing Up Hard are drawn from Weber’s own experiences in institutional leadership roles over more than 25 years as a social worker and selfdescribed serial social entrepreneur.

In the framework of Showing Up Hard, the foundation of leadership is engagement as a Compassionate

Witness. “The Compassionate Witness offers themself as an empathetic and perhaps resourceful observer of another’s journey,” Weber writes.

She distinguishes this approach from an Enmeshed style of engagement, common for those called to help others but also draining and neglectful of boundaries; and a Missed Connection style, in which the potential helper cultivates distance from the person they are in a position to help, often out of fear of what might happen to them (for instance, becoming Enmeshed) if they get involved.

A hallmark of showing up as a Compassionate Witness is knowing yourself: your skills and what you can offer in a given scenario; the limits to what you are able to provide; your learned responses to conflict; how you communicate all this to others. With this approach, there is no confusion as to where the helper begins and the person they seek to help ends. In the space where the two overlap is the “sweet spot” of maximum opportunity to experience authentic connection, and to convey empathy—another key muscle a leader must build.

The theme of boundaries and containers, overlaps and intersections, courses through the text. “It took me many years to really embody the fact that I have choice in how I engage,” reflects Weber from her position as a lifetime giver: the oldest of 14 siblings, a mother of three young adults, a trainer of crisis responders, a supporter of women experiencing numerous forms of violence. “It’s not

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Courtesy of the author

Show Up Hard: A Road Map for Helpers in Crisis,

by Shannon Weber, MSW

selfish to identify all the ways we are not available or not choosing to show up,” Weber writes. “Knowing what you choose not to do can illuminate the possibilities of what you can do.”

The text is organize into Books, and the above engagement styles are introduced in the first chapter of Book One: “Embarking.” Here, the main terms of Showing Up Hard are defined and explored. It is no accident that the second chapter is devoted to self-care: not just giving a nod to this essential component of leadership, but outlining practical steps to incorporate replenishment into the cycle of giving.

“Without our own oxygen mask

Reviews Book Review secured, assuring that we can also breathe,” Weber asserts, borrowing a tip familiar to commercial air travelers, “we are of little assistance to others.”

Book Two, “Detours,” addresses common complications on the journey to Show Up Hard—such as confusing empathy with sympathy (“Sympathy lacks connection… Empathy takes a different level of energy and engagement”) and leading others with saving them (“People save themselves. This is a truth”). The myriad social plagues identified within these pages (burnout, well-meaning but unhealthy organizational environments, lack of empathy and accountability from managers) are all framed in terms of the opportunities they offer for strengthening awareness and deepening leadership practices. Even vicarious trauma, so critical an aspect of social change work that it earns its own chapter in Book Two, Weber regards as a gift: “I carry inside me the stories of hundreds of traumas,” she explains; “I wouldn’t have it any other way. …While I will never forget these stories, they are no longer shouting inside my head and aching in my bones. These stories inform how I view the world.”

The final Book, “Arriving,” surveys methods for maintaining a long-term practice of Showing Up Hard. By this point, readers have encountered an array of journey-themed practice sections, interwoven with somatics and mindfulness principles, that encourage immediate application to our own work and lives: Reflection Rest Stops for checking in with mind and body around presented themes; Empathy Adventures Passports to document how new experiences have challenged our assumptions or biases; a Resiliency Landscape to inventory our self-care resources. Still more tools await download at ShowUpHard.com.

ShowUpHard.com/Note-To-Self

One of many "Notes to Self" interspersed in the pages of Show Up Hard.

In the closing Book, the text’s encouraging, candid tone culminates in reminders to readers of our capacity to strengthen our leadership muscles, of the fact that all that we need is in us, and of the pain we will likely experience, and witness, on the path forward.

“We build skill and hone our ability to shape containers and develop a network of supporting resources,” Weber notes, “And yet there are situations

that bring us to our knees. That take our breath away. That shock us with their gravity.” When faced with those moments, Weber advises, we can revisit our why.

“We return again and again to the basics of the Show Up Hard practice,” Weber writes in conclusion. “Because we can. Because it works. Because the world needs you in this moment. Right now.”

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Orr, D. W. (2019). Designing Regenerative Cultures. Solutions 10(3): 54-55. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/designing-regenerative-cultures

Reviews Book Review

Designing Regenerative Cultures Introduction by David W. Orr REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION Designing Regenerative Cultures, 2016, Triarchy Press, Axminster.

Daniel Christian Wahl

C

ultures are not designed from the top down as much as they grow organically from the bottom up.

We try to understand the various happenings through the lenses of history, sociology, anthropology and, after the passage of enough time, archaeology.

Even if cultures cannot be designed as whole and coherent things, we have acquired a knack for designing parts like the banking system, the educational system or the next high-rise development. The things so created, however, are mostly tailored to the convenience of the existing structures of power and wealth without regard for the other parts or the long term.

The resulting incoherence is a source of much befuddlement to scholars.

So, after several millennia of trial, error and happenstance, our future is in jeopardy. We are trending to a world of maybe eleven billion people, divided by ethnicity, religion, income and nationality. We don’t much like each other and the prospects for lethal conflicts are many. We are coming apart at the seams as nation-states appear powerless when challenged by drug cartels, cyber criminals and terrorist organizations.

We are increasingly networked, interlinked and mutually dependent but often unable to find common purpose and act for the common good.

We are caught between the centripetal and centrifugal forces of post-modernity. And the pace of technological change is accelerating,

giving us little time—or even inclination—for reflection. Not the least, we are rapidly changing the climate, extinguishing species, acidifying oceans and destroying entire ecologies.

Against this backdrop, Daniel Wahl proposes “designing regenerative cultures”. The vision of a designed future is easy to dismiss as yet another utopian scheme with roughly the same chance of success as Marxism or 19th-century Fourierism. The differences, however, are many.

First, in contrast to all previous eras, we know for certain that business as usual will be suicidal. That has been said so often and for so long as to appear trite with the effect of inducing mass narcosis. Unfortunately, it is true and we should pay attention. Second, the scale of our predicament is global; there are no safe places left anywhere on Earth.

Third, as Wahl describes, the ecological design arts broadly are flourishing. They are transforming farming, building, transportation, manufacturing and planning in ways congenial to ecologies and Earth systems. Their common characteristics are the use of nature as a model for design, maximal use of solar energy, preservation of biological and cultural diversity, and full-cost accounting.

Ecological design is no longer a distant prospect, it is happening all over the world. It is practical, not theoretical.

It has very large political consequences,

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but is itself non-ideological and neither liberal nor conservative—simply forward. It is also affecting economics, accounting and the behaviour of investors and corporations. But ecological design has yet to change politics and calibrate governance with ecological processes and systems.

Fourth, ecological design transcends the Western experience. It is not synonymous with engineering or science. Rather, it is a compendium of the entire human experience of farming, building, engineering, planning and making. The ancient Javanese farm or the Balinese water system, for example, demonstrated remarkable design skills, which in some ways exceed our own. That is true partly because the design of resource flows of water and materials coincided with cultural and religious norms in ways that we, in our more compartmentalized world, find incomprehensible.

Vernacular design, at its best, included humans, animals, land and waters as whole systems ordained by complex religious systems. The flaws were many, but the results were often durable over centuries. The fact is that

DeChristopher, T. (2019). A Concerned Citizen: Civics in Action Bo Boudart Producer and Director. Solutions 10(3): 55-56. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/a-concerned-citizen:-civics-in-action-bo-boudart-producer-and-director

Reviews Book Review there is much to learn about wholesystems design from other cultures and in other times.

Fifth, design is a systems revolution which is the art of seeing things whole and regarding our actions together with their likely consequences. Given the complexity of all systems and our inescapable ignorance, a systems perspective requires humility and precaution. It means working at a smaller scale, say, the neighbourhood, the farm, the factory, before generalizing to systems at a larger scale. Changing the scale also changes the system and so on.

Thinking in systems over longer periods of time is the revolution of our time. All of our new gadgetry and inventions pale in comparison. We are, as Wahl ably describes, parts of larger wholes, no one and no organization can be an island complete in itself. The upshot is that systems thinking moves us toward enlightened self-interest by which we understand that our

wellbeing and human flourishing is collective, not individual; long-term, not short-term.

Sixth, whether acknowledged or not, systems thinking is kin to the core meaning of religion—‘to bind together’ in Latin. We, living in a secular culture, tend not to see the connection, but it is nonetheless inescapable. Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ and the rules of decent behaviour prescribed in each of the Axial religions bear more than a coincidental similarity to the rules of enlightened design.

We are our brother’s keeper and also that of the bears, whales, birds, soils, trees, lands and waters; and they ours.

The entire system is mindful, shot through with consideration.

The word ‘regenerative’ in the title of this book signifies a commitment to the life processes inherent in ecological design. That, too, is reciprocal, mutual and inescapable. It also carries the command of the writer of

Deuteronomy to “choose life” [30:19] Whether from self-interest or duty, the command requires that we comprehend and value life and life processes, become ecologically competent stewards of land, wildlife, soils, waters, and that we care.

Daniel Wahl has compiled a great deal of useful information in a masterful synthesis. That alone is a significant accomplishment, but he’s given us more than that. Designing Regenerative Cultures describes the doorway to a possible, indeed, necessary future. We are not fated to the dystopia in prospect. We have, as he writes, the capacity to design and to organize our societies to protect, enhance and celebrate life. The blueprint was there all along. The awareness of our possibilities is growing. The art and sciences of ecological design are flourishing. The choice, as always, is ours and that of those who will follow.

keep digging, keeping learning, and keep organizing. Her work provides a powerful illustration of what happens when someone begins down a path towards justice and refuses to relent.

Now Bo Boudart has produced a short and accessible documentary called “A Concerned Citizen” to introduce audiences to Ott’s 30 years of fighting for a livable and just world.

Riki Ott was launched into activism when the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil near her fishing community in Cordova, Alaska.

Her journey toward justice for that disaster led her not only to work on the frontlines of the Deepwater

Horizon and Kalamazoo River spills, but also to examining the structure of corporate personhood that allows oil companies to destroy ecosystems with impunity. In all of her work to defend communities from the oil industry, she kept running into the obstacle of the corporate control of government, so she tackled that too. In 2009, with the Citizens United decision on the horizon, Ott co-founded Move to Amend to launch the movement to amend the constitution to clarify that corporations are not people and money is not speech.

This relentlessness and willingness to expand her struggle are some of Riki Ott’s defining gifts. Lots of citizens are

Media Review A Concerned Citizen: Civics in Action Bo Boudart Producer and Director Bullfrogfilms.com (2019)

by Tim DeChristopher “What can I do? What can I do?”

That is the question constantly asked of Riki Ott, and not only does she have an answer, she has a whole curriculum about what citizens can do and have done to exercise their power to shape their own society. But equally instructive is the lived example of Riki herself, who demonstrates that what one can do is keep pushing,

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Reviews Media Review concerned about something, but when they figure out that the battle is bigger than expected, most people back down and accept the status quo as inevitable.

This process of digging deeper and addressing one obstacle to justice after another has the potential to be frustrating or even demoralizing for an activist. If you start trying to protect clean water in your backyard, but run into all the ways that government and industry has rigged the system against your community, you might soon find yourself ten steps away from your initial target, struggling against immense institutions. But the truly inspiring thing about Riki’s journey up the chain of power is that she ends up at the grassroots, educating citizens about their power and responsibilities. When she found that the solutions needed to fix the systemic problems with our government were hindered by the lack of public understanding of the role of citizens, Riki created a civics education curriculum called “Activating My Democracy.” That civics education course has become one more tool that Riki uses to help communities across the country in their struggle against the interconnected crises of our time.

So when Riki says, “I feel like we are on the cusp of a serious revolution where people wake up and take back their power,” we know that prophecy is rooted in real-world connection with frontline communities. Because it comes from someone who has spent a lifetime ploughing the ground and planting the seeds of that revolution, this is not a prediction to be dismissed as a naive wish.

While the film fails to provide much background into Riki’s personal life and the presumed sacrifices involved in her activism, it also steers clear of the hero culture and “tireless activist” tropes that can befall activist

documentaries. Calling activists “tireless” relieves us of the responsibility to join them by pretending that they possess some superhuman ability to not get tired. But the film presents Riki’s progression as simply the result of continuing to take the next logical steps necessary to protect her community. While she certainly got tired in her 30 years of that journey, she was

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relentless. She continued to take the next step, even if it involved the enormously daunting task of amending the constitution or the slow and mundane task of teaching civics to kids. And by framing her as a “Citizen,” the film suggests that the wide range of Riki’s activism, from the local and personal to the systemic and revolutionary, is the responsibility of all of us.

Mangundu, R. and J. Braby. (2019). Games for Sustainable Development Goals Namibia: Towards Youth Engagement in Achieving Sustainability.

Solutions 10(3): 57-60. https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/games-for-sustainable-development-goals-namibia-towards-youth-engagement-in-achieving-sustainability

On The Ground

Games for Sustainable Development Goals Namibia: Towards Youth Engagement in Achieving Sustainability

by Reinhold Mangundu and Justine Braby

Moral Katonyala

Participants playing the Food for All game on arable land

T

here is a lot of research that shows that simple interactive games can help us better understand systems and anticipate emerging complex phenomena . The games for the SDGs enable us to study complex interwoven challenges and think ‘outside the box’. This enables us to come up with possible solutions and to build resilience through selfaction. The Sustainable Development Goals, through the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable

Development, are also complex and interlinked, and require complexity and systems thinking to fully understand and act upon. Around the world, simulation gaming as a tool for problem solving is slowly gaining momentum. In the scientific discourse, training workshops and seminars are slowly integrating scenario planning into simulation games for better and inclusive decision making among various stakeholders.

Most of these games provide an interdisciplinary understanding to complex global challenges that can only be addressed with well informed and integrated decisions. These decisions come as a result of changes in perception and culture.1 Through gaming experience, participants experience and explore different impacts of problems and how they impact our societies in real life. The experience during the simulation exposes participants to various emotions

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On The Ground

Moral Katonyala

Namibian Youth Coalition on Climate Change Project coordinator leads participants into a debrief

and feelings. These often results to changes in behaviour and perceptions.

During the entire process, participants become sensitised and empowered to take stewardship in achieving sustainability. Risks taken in the game enables participants to navigate and co-create possible alternatives when the usual strategies do not work out.2 This is fundamental because, real complex problems us to take incremental steps and co-create possible solutions.

Where Is Started and How Far the Games Have Come In 2016, a group of young passionate Namibians started with a series of games called ‘Games for the SDGs ‘.They first piloted the game called World Climate Simulation, which was

developed by Climate Interactive in conjunction with MIT.3 The team of young people hosted the game ahead of the Conference of Parties that took in Marrakesh, Morocco in 2016. It successfully managed to put young Namibians in the shoes of world leaders at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP22). Young people were exposed to climate science and their ambitions were tested against a climate model used worldwide. The game enabled them to see the effect of their decisions on the world and the urgency that comes with addressing the climate crises. This is very fundamental as it promotes activism and ensures young people take the responsibility of being

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the stewards of the earth. It has been played in 64 countries with over 28 000 participants so far. A recent survey conducted few years ago, showed that 76 percent of all participants felt that they were more likely to engage and change their behaviour around climate change. The success of the game thus led to the series of games called ‘Games for the SDGs’.

These games were hosted by Progress Namibia in conjunction with the Hanns Seidel Foundation, the National Youth Coalition on Climate Change, the National Youth Council, as well as AISEC Namibia. Most of the games have already been developed by various organisations and individuals.

They are often contextualised to the local context and so they speak to the

On The Ground different SDGs and their targets (In this case, Namibia).The games strongly targets and speaks to young people.

The majority of young people are the most vulnerable to global challenges at the hands of uncontrolled and unsustainable actions of the anthropocene. Young people are the future to sustainable and resilient societies and thus, it is imperative to equally engage them in the discussion about the complex challenges we face today and how these may affect the future of young people.

A lot of young people have the ability to mould unprecedented innovative ideas into amicable solutions. These can help to address most of these emerging complex problems.

For this to happen, there needs to be platforms for inclusive discussions geared towards achieving long-term sustainability.

During the period of February 2017 and November 2018, about 25 games have been successfully run.

These are games ranging from 8 to 50 participants per game. The games focused on a different set of goals each time, although the SDGs are all interwoven. Only one game from the series of games was hosted each month month. At the beginning of each game, participants would receive an introduction to the SDGs, as a way of familiarising them with the SDGS . In most cases, the SDGs do not trickle down to all levels. The young people particularly, see them as something too complex to understand and that they are only meant for high level decision making in our governments. This lack of awareness undermines young people’s ability help contribute to the realisation of a ‘sustainable and just society’. The presentation shows them that, we all have a role to play because the SDGs apply to every single individual, society and nation.

Creating a Safe Space for Discussion The Facilitation of the game is usually for small groups (anything between 10 and 40 people, depending on the specific game). This type of facilitation promotes a safe and intimate space which allows time for deep dialogue, which is the most essential part of the game. It takes place after the game and steers deep reflection and enables the facilitator to unpack complexities felt by participants. In order to ensure that the feedback and voices of every participant is heard, the dialogue requires the group to sit in a circle, creating a safe space to speak freely.

When participants feel free and safe, they are more likely to open up to conservations and unpack powerful lessons provided by the game.

There has been a growing demand from local universities and schools.

During the year 2018, there were a diverse number of young people from various backgrounds who had enthusiastically showed interest in the games and as a result, some of the games were run at their respective schools.

On the 17th of October 2018, three of the games where run in parallel with about 150 young people from all spheres of the country as part of the Youth for Global Goals Conference. The aim of the conference was to introduce young people to SDGs and co-create and navigate ways in which they can contribute to the achievement of the ambitious goals. In November 2018, the Department of Architecture and Spatial Planning from the Namibian

These games provide an interdisciplinary understanding to complex global challenges that can only be addressed with well informed and integrated decisions.

The impact of the games is always seemingly high in nature, even when the numbers are small. There has been several returning participants as well as participants who have had emotional and deeply connected experiences (what we in the facilitation world call ‘edge work’ where a participant goes to an uncomfortable space, the ‘edge’ in order to have a change in mental model/world view).

For this to work, the series needs to be intimate and reach participants at a very personal level.

Key Lessons After two years of successful gaming, several key lessons were well documented to improve the whole process.

University of Namibia had put in a request for the games. They were used as an interactive presentation tool for the research of undergraduate students. Two of the games were used to steer discussions around the feasibility of urban agriculture and the provision of adequate water and sanitation facilities for the informal settlements of Namibia .

There’s a need to develop new games to avoid repetition of some of the games, especially given that that participants are returning each month. So far only three new games have been developed by the team.

The team is working towards exploring and developing new games that could possibly look at scenarios in

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On The Ground

Moral Katonyala

Participants pose for a group photo

which 100 percent of all SDGs have been achieved. The team is also further looking into the possibility of developing digital games to enhance outreach to many young people from all grassroots.

The Future of the Games for the SDGs—Moving Forward The games have shown to be very successful due to the increasing demand.

The Hanns Seidel Foundation and the British High Commission in Namibia have both allocated funds to continue the collaboration into 2019. About 12 games will be hosted this year and time was invested in research and development of two interactive civic education games on effective governance and democracy. The civic games will be used to engage

citizens, pre the Namibian national elections planned to take place in November 2019. There is a need for this engagement as citizens are not entirely aware of the importance of

A lot of young people have the ability to mould unprecedented innovative ideas into amicable solutions

The Namibian Youth Coalition on Climate Change has been selected to take ownership of coordinating and hosting the games, in conjunction with the initial key partners. A training of trainers was thus, conducted in the beginning of 2019 , with about ten young people who will be running the series of games for the entire year.

References 1. https://games4sustainability.org/2015/10/28/thepower-of-games-will-games-change-the-world/

their vote in a democratic country, where decisions by the government affect their everyday of living. The organisational structure of the game process for 2019 has been changed to make provision for youth ownership.

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2. Meya, J. N.; Eisenack, K. 2017: Effectiveness of gaming for communicating and teaching climate change. The Systems Discussion Paper No. 2017-3.

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Pp. 1-31. edoc.hu-berlin.de/series/thesysdiscpapers 3. https://climate-change-initiative.org/research/ simulation-games

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TABLE OF CONTENTS: List of Figures; List of Tables; List of Contributors; Foreword

by Tim Keane; 1. Regenerative Development: Urbanization, Climate Change and the Common Good; Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Beatrice Frank, John L Knott, Jr , Kenneth S. Sagendorf and Eugene Wilkerson; 2. The Regenerative Paradigm: Discerning How We Make Sense of the World Carol Sanford 3. The Centrality of the Systems Approach: Regenerative Development, Resilience and Sustainability Beth Schaefer Caniglia 4. Toward a Regenerative Psychology of Place Nicholas S. Mang 5. Regenerative Development and Environmental Justice David N. Pellow 6. Governing Regenerative Development Thomas Dietz 7. Regenerative Development and Environmental Ethics: Healing the Mismatch between Culture and the Environment in the Third Millennium Thomas J. Burns, Tom W. Boyd and Carrie M. Leslie 8. Regenerative Economics L. Hunter Lovins 9. CityCrafting®: Evolution of Regenerative Development and Regenerative Development in Practice John L Knott,Jr 10. Rethinking Memorial Public Spaces as Regenerative through a Dynamic Landscape Assessment Plan Approach Rebecca Sheehan 11.

Integrating Social Science and Positive Psychology into Regenerative Development and Design Processes Jennifer Eileen Cross and Josette M. Plaut 12. Workforce Development: A Regenerative Perspective Eugene A. Wilkerson and Allison Dake 13. Education for Regeneration Kenneth S. Sagendorf and Barbara J. Jackson 14. Conclusion Beth Schaefer Caniglia, John L Knott,Jr and Beatrice Frank Index

This volume focuses on the theory and practice of the regenerative development paradigm, which is rapidly displacing sustainability as the most fertile ground for climate change adaptation research. It brings together key thinkers in this field to develop a meaningful synthesis between the existing practice of regenerative development and the input of scholars in the social sciences. It will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of regenerative development, climate change, urban planning and public policy.

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