Introduction
The biggest challenges to achieving sustainability are the current institutional frameworks in private and public entities and the respective regulatory compliance they follow. Albert Einstein once stated, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” This statement holds true regarding realizing sustainability in the coming years.
Pursuing the goals and objectives to meet the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals per the respective standards within these current frameworks can improve the quality of the environment and ecosystems we cohabitate within. However, these frameworks have been designed, implemented, and managed using a top-down linear, three-dimensional management model seeking to remedy symptoms.
A sustainable management model necessitates a holistic, multidimensional approach that recognizes the value of the whole, the dynamic value of the total result, is always exponentially greater than the sum of its parts. Circular economics, focusing on the reuse and recycling of all legacy waste sites and current operational and planned development externalities, presents a promising start to these institutional, linear limiting, and symptomatic challenges.
The good news is that we are not starting from scratch. We already have technological and organizational solutions to accelerate our collective journey to sustainability. Many of these solutions have been around for over a decade and, if effectively implemented, can significantly improve the quality and quantity of the triple bottom line.
Current Institutional Framework and Self-Imposed Paradigms
As discussed in previous #LeadingSoulutions articles, the current organizational top-down, monarchy-based models often create more blind spots to improvement opportunities than the improvements identified. The reason for these blind spots is based on how the top-down structures tend to “silo” people as they “manage up to the C-Suite.”
Sustainability is a “team sport” that requires all stakeholders to collaborate and work together for the betterment of the whole. This sustainability team sport is also not where teams compete with each other, but rather work across silos, organizations, and other entities that have often been perceived as “the competition” or a “regulatory nuisance.”
The current institutional frameworks need to be re-designed for coopetition purposes. Competition happens when businesses collaborate on specific areas where they can mutually benefit while still competing in other areas. This can be a strategic move to:
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- Share information: Relevant ecosystem and associated externality information, as well as innovative insights for sustainable innovations and development.
- Share resources: Sharing expertise can reduce costs and risks for both parties and accelerate benefits realization.
- Develop, discover, and implement sustainable products and solutions: Combining expertise can lead to further innovation in recycling and reuse.
- Set closed-loop industry standards: Collaborating can help shape the industry’s future, sustainability, and perception of externalities and their potential uses.
This strategic move can catalyze a shift in current regulatory paradigms, which tend to overfocus on treating symptoms rather than ensuring the desired outcome.
Shift Regulatory Paradigms
Federal, provincial, state, and local government environmental regulatory compliance has been predominantly reactive legislation. This reactive legislation has often been rushed, heavily lobbied with undue influence, and only treated symptoms rather than the root cause.
The following graphic provides a history of the predominant reactive nature of this legislation.
The one exception on this chart is the US Infrastructure Act, which provided vital incentives to address climate change and initiate economic incentives for sustainability.
ESG has also focused very heavily on greenhouse gas emissions, specifically on the following:
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- Carbon dioxide (CO₂)
- Methane (CH₄)
- Nitrous oxide (N₂O)
- Fluorinated gases
While there is a lot of data on these gas emissions and their contribution to air pollution, focusing on the desired outcome (clean air) would be preferable. In addition to clean air, ESG must also focus and emphasize the need for clean water, fertile soil, and food security outcomes.
Restructuring regulatory compliance to focus on desired outcomes and how best to measure those outcomes could open the free market to collaboration and innovation on the most efficient and effective solutions to achieve those outcomes. In addition to opening up the free market to collaboration and innovation on these solutions, those solutions would become more localized because one size does not fit all ecosystems regarding sustainability.
The good news is that solutions for sustainability largely exist today, which may accelerate the shift of these institutional paradigms.
Available Sustainable Solutions
Sustainable solutions for air, water, energy, fertile soil, and food security have been available for more than a decade and are growing. That is the good news!
Solutions can safely clean our legacy waste sites, such as landfills and deserted mine sites, and the residual waste that continues contaminating our soil, tributaries, and groundwater. These solution treatment byproducts have the potential to be reused as a resource by other industries. This potential reuse could further reduce the associated industry waste and provide materials that can be leveraged into sustainable building materials.
There are sustainable solutions that can clean contaminated water, industrial farming sludge, sewage, etc., resulting in reusable potable water and raw materials for agricultural and industrial purposes. These solutions can significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the pollution in the air we all breathe.
A growing number of renewable and intelligent grid energy distribution solutions can significantly increase energy efficiency and effectiveness. Solar, green hydrogen, ocean waves, and vertical wind energy solutions are increasingly available for industrial and residential use. Smart grid and wireless energy transfer solutions can localize energy distributions and provide a multidimensional “daisy chain” of backup options to eliminate the current “leaky bucket” archaic grid system and mandated “rolling blackouts.”
These solutions have not been widely utilized and adopted mainly because there have been no economic incentives for many private and public entities to adopt them. Yet ESG may catalyze the adoption of these existing and even more innovative solutions. However, regulatory paradigms must shift from regulating symptoms and “how-to procedures” to the desired outcome.
Conclusion
We are the ones we have been waiting for to address environmental degradation with sustainable solutions. However, the first solution is to understand that no one size fits all, and those solutions must be local and decentralized. Respective stakeholders must be empowered to assess, understand, and determine the best path forward within and surrounding their respective ecosystems.
A robust complement of sustainable solutions available today can be leveraged to clean our air, water, and soil and provide renewable energy. I know this because ever since the national pilot on sustainability with the tribal governments, I have continued to pursue my vision while earning a living in enterprise transformations.
This pursuit has resulted in me assisting innovative startups, their technologies, and their innovators in identifying potentially new market opportunities while focusing on the long game. It also helped me identify early investment opportunities in sustainable solutions where the initial innovators had not fully realized how these solutions could be applied and what business opportunities therein. I have an off-grid residence, predominantly powered by solar energy. I am currently researching how to create a closed loop power system that makes hydrogen from excess solar energy for use with a hydrogen fuel cell backup generator.
I also embraced the concept, principle, and results of applied circular economics while realizing that circular economics needs to evolve into a Fibonacci economic model.
A Fibonacci economic model can be localized but expansive, multi-dimensional, and with fractal characteristics that can be repeated across various interdependent communities and ecosystems.
The solutions exist to start our sustainable journey. We only need to work together toward a common desired outcome while realizing that that outcome will require different approaches and solutions depending on local characteristics.
By Randy Spires, Avasant Fellow