The Stockholm Environment Institute and Tällberg Foundation have jointly initiated a multi-year project. It asks, “What is the practical meaning of sustainability?”
The political, economic and technological systems that successfully have brought us a world of globalized growth and increased wealth for the greater part of humanity have at the same time resulted in a weakening of the delivery capabilities of most ecosystems services – including drinking water, biodiversity, fossil energy, forests, a stable atmosphere, etc. Despite over 700 agreements on protection of the environment, our planet’s ability to generate welfare is diminishing fast.
We have also entered the era of “supercomplexity”, where social and ecological drivers interact across scales from local to global, generating unexpected trajectories, feedbacks and tipping points. The Western lifestyle impinges on the abilities of fishermen on Greenland or farmers in southern Africa to create their own wealth and welfare. Hurdle effects and positive feedback loops enhance the environmental impact over time, with today’s emissions of greenhouse gases resulting in unforeseen and effects several years ahead.
In response, we need to act globally on several different fronts. To make this possible, new mental maps are needed as the basis for broad cooperation where the global ecosystem is the foundation for welfare and societal development. All humans in all countries are united in their pursuit for their own sustainable survival and development. It would be a great tragedy if these individual interests could not be combined with and transformed into a common interest.
To seek clearer answers to the question: “What is the practical meaning of sustainability?”, Stockholm Environment Institute and Tällberg Foundation have jointly initiated this project. The project will bridge science and policy on the fundamental and far-reaching system changes required in societies for true transitions to sustainability from local to global scales.
The objective of this long-term initiative is to explore and develop a new vision, tentatively called ”Business As Sustainable”. We intend to prepare an ”idealized design” for how the institutions and economic systems could work – in any future technological structure – to deliver growth that with broad safety margins is compatible with the ecosystems’ ability to renew its delivery capacity. The project will be based on a ”systems approach” – we will base our work in the whole rather than in any particular parts of the whole.
The project will develop scenarios for how the transformation from “Business As Usual” to “Business As Sustainable” – step by step – practically could be put into practice. We will also look into the scenarios of failures – formulate thinking around the un-thinkable.
The project, within a number of parallel initiatives, will work with myths and values, political and economic assumptions about the technological development, alternative political models, institutional innovations on global as well as local level, regulatory initiatives, etc. The scenario development will build on surveys of initiatives and proposals in the current debate and in literature, as well as on research and creative development initiated within the project. The scenarios will result in tangible cases that will contribute to a concretization of the international debate about how today’s and tomorrow’s common global challenges in a faster and safer way can find its solutions. The results will also provide key input to the parallel project “In Search of the Common Sense”.