Quantifying Nature Positive

To become mainstream, Nature Positive development needs positive messaging, measures and metrics to guide, plan and assess urban outcomes. With accelerating climate crisis and negative messages getting the upper-hand, it is important to avoid paralysis by bad news. Whilst striving for a nature positive world, more effort should be on moving beyond zero to qualify and quantify benefits, gains and regenerative outcomes instead of around damage and loss sticking points. Life Cycle Benefit Assessment (LCBA) methods measure gains in accelerating regeneration and climate security that enables a good news focus. Its reach beyond negative quantifies and shows positive gain beyond zero loss outcomes. The aims are to clarify concepts, challenges and quantitative methods then review real-world 3rd party Certified nature positive case studies. Climate security, human wellness and resource viability gains inside safe operating space within planetary boundaries are quantified as positive benefits. contrary to conventional Life Impact Cycle Impact Assessment LCBA assigns damage losses as negatives debts and benefit gains as positive savings. It concludes that LCBA remains under development with more research needed to model economic outcomes.

Nai Talim Today: Gandhi’s Critique of Industrialism and An Education for Swaraj

The children of today inhabit the planet when CO2 levels have exceeded 400 parts per million (ppm). Crucial planetary boundaries are breached, and the climate crisis has manifested itself menacingly along with several accompanying civilizational crises be it health, socio-economic, political or humanitarian. It is, according to us, the crisis of Industrialism. At this crucial juncture of converging planet-scale disasters where the very survival of humanity is at severe risk, we explore fresh insights into alternative imaginations that can foster a new world where we not just survive but flourish. One such alternative imagination of a good society is that by Gandhi. A century ago, he outlined this vision as Swaraj and, over the years, fleshed out this vision. It is for this Swaraj that in 1937, Gandhi, conceptualizing his educational ideas, initiated a programme known as Nai Talim. Swaraj was diametrically opposite to Industrialism. And, therefore, Nai Talim was in sharp contrast to the state-approved school education that promoted Industrialism. In this article, we give a brief outline of Swaraj; highlight the interconnections between Swaraj and Nai Talim; and expand on ways in which one can reimagine Gandhi’s Nai Talim for contemporary times. We also argue that such an imagination of reinvented Nai Talim is possible today in Indigenous communities, where there is a spirited resistance to industrialism. And as an example, we look at the ongoing experiment of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico.

Repair tables, broken vacuum cleaners and posters: Weaving new worlds together in response to breakdowns

When people decide to gather and repair broken devices together, it seems obvious that repairers and visitors gain all kinds of instrumental competences (e.g. repair knowledge, skills, and attitudes) and that they can also experience deeply a transformative learning process about, for example, the need to keep planetary boundaries within the sustainable limits of life. In this article we approach the educational dimension of repair cafés differently and sketch the outlines of a minor public pedagogy. We analyze repair cafés as situated and entangled assemblages of both human and non-human actors; assemblages that are always very local and that need to be analyzed as specific, designated places—and times—where something is at stake. The central focus of this article is on substantiating this notion of a minor public pedagogy by offering a detailed analysis of the particular pedagogic moments that emerge in these encounters between humans and things. The navigational capacity of this public pedagogy is minor in nature as it doesn’t create clear signposts of where to go as humans. Instead, it engenders many moments of and propels humans into a sensory sensitivity for inhabiting the world in the here-and-now.

2. Looming Tragedy

Ecologists have applied the concept of “carrying capacity”, the population of a species that an ecosystem can support, to human populations. Ecological limits to growth in population and the economy dominated environmental concern in the 1970s and beyond. More recently they have been supplanted by the idea of planetary boundaries, based on the stresses that the earth system is capable of absorbing, several of which (including biosphere integrity and climate change) have already been transgressed, suggesting the system is in grave peril. This chapter also considers the points of critics of the idea that there can be limits, then analyzes the political implications of limits and boundaries, from the authoritarianism associated with some 1970s thinkers to the need for cooperative global action to the more democratic possibilities that could be associated with degrowth and planetary boundaries.

The Politics of the Earth

This book provides an accessible introduction to environmental politics through a powerful, discourse-centred approach which analyzes how environmental affairs are constructed and interpreted through language. It recounts developments beginning with the arrival of environmental crisis in the late 1960s, which yielded dire warnings about global shortages and ecological collapse. It moves through subsequent decades to the Paris Agreement on climate change, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and the anti-environmental backlash of denial and “Gray Radicalism”. The book develops an innovative approach to understanding contemporary environmental discourses, covering ecological limits and planetary boundaries, pragmatic problem-solving, sustainability, ecological modernization, and green radicalism, as well as radical anti-environmentalism. It analyzes key developments in environmental affairs alongside many examples that illustrate how discourses shape past and current debates on the environment. It concludes by examining the radical implications of the Anthropocene concept.

Regenerative Organizations: Introduction to the Special Issue

This special issue presents six articles and two invited editorials that explore the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of regenerative organizing. Together, they draw on a range of disciplines from both organizational and environmental sciences to discover, theorize, and illustrate life-giving intersections between humans and natural ecosystems in Anthropocene. This introduction provides an overview of the reasons for, and especially the possibilities of, regenerative organizing as we stress the limits of planetary boundaries in a post-climate change world.

Developmental trajectories of nations based on equity, historic responsibility, and planetary boundaries

A major challenge for humanity today is to articulate a developmental vision that can achieve a reasonable quality of life for the global population of over 7 billion without breaching planetary boundaries. The Human Development Index (HDI) (UNDP 2010), which externalizes the planetary pressures of economic growth, promotes misguided development models since countries scoring highest on HDI have transgressed multiple planetary boundaries (O’Neill et al. 2018). The question is whether templates of development exist among the fraternity of nations that may be sustainably scaled to the global population. To study this question, we construct a new conceptual framework foregrounding the principles of equity, historic responsibility, and planetary boundaries. We propose a new environmentally-driven measure of human development – called the eHDI – that internalizes the climate and ecological pressures of economic growth. Analysis of the developmental trajectories of countries over the past three decades based on the eHDI reveals profound insights. We identify Panama, Costa Rica, Albania, Sri Lanka, and Georgia as the top examplar models that can provide reasonably high levels of human development to the entire global population with low environmental pressures. However, a conservative extrapolation of current trends indicates that only the Sri Lankan and Costa Rican trajectories may remain (largely) within planetary boundaries by 2050. Our results, therefore, foreground these two countries as the ones that merit the most focus in sustainability policy studies.

Knowledge transfer supporting sustainable development: implications for regional intermediaries

The wicked sustainability challenges of current socio-technical systems, crossing the planetary boundaries vital for human life, call for fundamental and radical change in the form of transitions. These sustainability transitions require a knowledge basis of relevant actors in the system, which intermediary structures organizing knowledge transfer can support. Over the last decades, sustainability researchers have not only increasingly studied the dynamics of transitions (Rip and Kemp 1998; Geels 2002; Papachristos et al. 2013), but have also gained insights on activities contributing to the acceleration of transitions and the sup-portive role of intermediaries in that regard (Wieczorek and Hekkert 2012; Kanda et al. 2018; Kivimaa et al. 2019). This paper revisits the literature on the dynamics of transitions, the activities of intermediaries in contributing in order to formulate implications of the characteristics of sustainable development and sustainability transitions and the related knowledge types for the organization of knowledge transfer by regional intermediaries.