Sustainability, adaptability, and resilience: decoding the jargon

There are a lot of buzzwords circulating these days around sustainability and climate change. It can get confusing or hard to keep up with the new standards, labels, or certifications. To help clear this up, it is useful to talk about general principles that we use to guide our work.

There are a lot of buzzwords circulating these days around sustainability and climate change. It can get confusing or hard to keep up with the new standards, labels, or certifications. To help clear this up, it is useful to talk about general principles that we use to guide our work. To begin, we will discuss systems thinking.

Our work focuses on systems. In the context of sustainability, the intended effect is for the natural and human systems to be able to perpetuate in a way that ensures future abundance. That can translate to such actions as using waste as a resource, investing in the health and education of populations, or making sure that financial investments are made in companies that are prioritizing long-term health.

Sustainability is the science of understanding how much stress or resource use a system can withstand. Stressors can be predicted such as building new buildings or unpredictable, such as a hurricane. The main idea is that our collective actions today add to the resilience of the system as a whole in the future. That can mean constructing buildings that create more energy than they use or investing in protecting coastal ecosystems to protect from storm flooding. It is the planetary and societal equivalent of investing for your child’s education or restructuring your spending to get out of debt.

To continue the financial metaphor, most communities and individuals are not in a position to make significant investments in sustainability. That is where policy, research, and purchasing power come in. Policy allows for large-scale changes to be made in the public interest. Research helps to identify which resources we can use more efficiently and to explore methodologies and technologies to speed adoption of a more sustainable population on this planet. We also have incredible power to influence sustainability through being informed consumers. Our purchasing power can change business practices and allow us to invest in the systems that will restore our communities and ecosystems.

A key element in our individual and collective pursuit of sustainable systems is to embrace imperfection. This is a field where one is constantly learning and the problems are complex. It is far better for all of us to be doing an imperfect job that few of us doing it perfectly. Humility and curiosity provide a critical foundation to learn more about sustainable systems.