Changing the Game

Sustainable Market Transformation Strategies to Understand and Tackle the Big and Complex Sustainability Challenges of Our Generation

Lucas Simons, Andre Nijhof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429626937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

We are at the beginning of the sustainability era. The biggest challenge of our generation is to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. For this we must be willing to understand and change the root causes that create these challenges in the first place. The system itself needs to change. But how to do that?

This ground-breaking book Changing the Game reveals the missing insights and strategies to actually achieve system change. The authors Lucas Simons and André Nijhof bring decades of real life and academic experience, and state that most of the sustainability challenges are actually caused by the same system failures, every time. Therefore, the way to accelerate and manage system change is also similar every time – if you know where to look and how to act.

The theory of sustainable market transformation and system change is described in a compelling and easy to understand eight-step approach applied to eight different sectors. The authors, together with respected sector experts, describe the drivers, triggers and dominant thinking in each of these sectors as well as the strategies needed to move towards higher levels of sustainability.

This book is highly accessible and engaging, and is perfect for use by professionals, leaders and students for understanding how to move markets to a more sustainable future.

1

What are the sustainability challenges of our generation?

1 The biggest challenges of our generation

1.1 Overshoot Day

For most people July 29, 2019 was a day like any other. People woke up, had breakfast, brought their kids to school, went to work, had dinner with their family, watched some television or went to the gym. Nothing special, right? Except that Monday July 29, 2019 was in fact an important milestone for everyone on the planet: it was Earth Overshoot Day 2019.¹

Overshoot Day is the date each year on which the global population is estimated to have consumed all the resources that planet Earth is able to regenerate in a year. In other words, by this day on Monday July 29, 2019, humanity had already extracted more out of the planet in terms of resources and materials than the earth could replenish in that year. And we had put more pollution into the system than the planet could remove.

This is a big deal.

Compare this planetary dilemma to a family having enough income at the beginning of each month to last at least the rest of the month. Preferably, there is something left over at the end of the month to save some for a rainy day or for an investment. Instead, all the money is already spent by the third week. The family, in need of groceries, paying rent and expenditures, has to borrow money to make it through the rest of the month. The borrowed money needs to be paid back with interest the following month, reducing the money that is available next month. Sure enough, the next month again the same thing happens. Only this time, since they had to pay interest on the borrowed amount last month, they have less disposable income to start with, and as a result they run out of money even sooner. On top of that, the family decides to spend even more. Clearly the income for that month will not be sufficient, and the family needs to borrow even more to cover both the interest and the increased spending. The next month this happens again. More interest needs to be paid, and again they increase their spending. This goes on month after month. Slowly the amount of money they have at the start of the month will be increasingly less sufficient to make it through a month. Until one day…

When we talk about Earth Overshoot Day we, of course, don’t talk about borrowing money that we have to pay back with interest. But it is still a good analogy. In reality, we are talking about taking more resources out of forests, oceans, biodiversity, the soil and the atmosphere than the Earth can replenish. Each year we increase what we take out. And we are not paying it back. Each year we are further diminishing the Earth’s capacity to clean up pollution or restore damage to living resources. As a result, Overshoot Day is coming earlier and earlier every year. Until one day…

As shown in Figure 1.1, during a 20-year period from 1980 to 2000, Overshoot Day went from early November (a two months deficit) to 1 October (a three months deficit). During the next 18-year period, this process accelerated. Between 2000 and 2018, Overshoot Day went from 1 October to 1 August – a five month deficit. Overshoot Day is now two months sooner! This is alarming news.

Figure 1.1 Overshoot Day is coming earlier every year. Original model from Global Footprint network.

The Global Footprint Network, which is the organization that calculates Earth Overshoot Day, estimates that to maintain our current level of consumption we would need 1.7² planets like the Earth³. Our rate of consumption is accelerating, and there are no signs that it is slowing down. If we continue like this over the next 50 to 60 years we will be on 100% overshoot at the beginning of each year. For most of us that will happen in our lifetime or the lives of our children, unless we change the direction we are going.

1.2 Staying within planetary boundaries

Overshoot Day is just one approach to measure our level of unsustianability as a society. There are others models that are useful to understand how serious the situation is.

In 2009, a group of environmental scientists, led by Professor Johan Rockström, published Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. This study outlines nine key ecological processes that are being severely affected by human activity and suggests that “pressures on the Earth System have reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded”⁴. Rockström et al. concluded that changing these natural processes by too big a margin or too quickly could be catastrophic for human life and wellbeing.⁵ Consequently, they proposed limits or boundaries for these processes; staying within those boundaries should allow a “safe space for human development” and avoid large-scale, planet-wide changes to the environment on which all of us depend totally for our existence.⁶

These key planetary processes are:

1. 1. Freshwater consumption;
2. 2. Climate change;
3. 3. Land use/conversion and degradation;
4. 4. Biodiversity loss;
5. 5. Ocean acidification;
6. 6. Depletion of the ozone layer;
7. 7. Chemical pollution;
8. 8. The release of aerosols into the atmosphere (air pollution);
9. 9. Disruption to the biogeochemical cycle (e.g. through excessive use of nitrogen-based fertilizers).

For seven of the nine processes, scientists have calculated quantifiable, measurable targets that are absolute limits to what our planet can sustain.⁷ They put maximum number limits on how much we can pollute, destroy, take or eliminate and still get away with it. For two of the nine processes, they have been unable to agree on quantifiable boundaries for chemical pollution and atmospheric aerosols (a type of air pollution) for now. These boundaries are crucial, but for the time being, without a limit, we simply do not know if we are overshooting them or not.

Of the seven planetary boundaries with absolute quantifiable targets, we do know we are already exceeding four of them in absolute terms. These boundaries are:

• Changes to the global nitrogen cycle;
• Climate change;
• Land-use conversion;
• Biodiversity loss.

The term “exceeding” in the previous sentence is an understatement. The data are very disturbing. Let’s look at the current facts on these overshoots. Hold on to your hat.

Overshoot one: nitrogen, the unknown killer

Most of us are familiar with nitrogen as the letter N in chemistry. It is widely available on this planet and used for many valuable purposes like food preservation production, refrigeration and as fertilizer to increase yields of agricultural production. However, most of us do not know that nitrogen is also a major source of pollution. When it comes to the quantity of nitrogen being used, we’re currently operating at almost 150% above a sustainable level. The global boundary for nitrogen is 62 million metric tons per year, but the actual use in 2015 was 150 million metric tons⁸. Note that these are global averages. As you can imagine, the maximum targets used will vary substantially based on soil type, climate, and environmental system.

More than two-thirds of atmospheric emissions of nitrous oxide arise from processes in soils, largely resulting from application of nitrogen fertilizers.⁹ The use of nitrogen fertilizer has risen from 11 million tons in 1961 to 108 million tons in 2014.¹⁰ Besides these chemical fertilizers, other sources of excess nitrogen include animal manure, discharged wastewater, use of fossil fuels in cars and industry, but also some of the soaps and detergents we use at home.

Excess nitrogen in the environment can have many consequences for water, soil, human health, and other aspects. All these problems, however, do not occur at the same rate or with the same intensity. Instead, they follow a sequence of effects from one environmental system to the other; this is called the nitrogen cascade.

Some systems, such as rivers and lakes, are quickly affected by excess nitrogen, but other systems, such as soils, can accumulate nitrogen for a longer period. As a result, the effects of excess nitrogen are very divergent. These effects include the following¹¹:

• Excess nitrogen in the form of fertilizers is leached away – almost 50% of it is not absorbed by plants – and enters our water systems, resulting in serious eutrophication of freshwater systems and acidification of terrestrial ecosystems. This leads to rapid algae growth, which impacts the ecosystems of water bodies by blocking sunlight, using up oxygen for other species and releasing toxins that are harmful to animals.¹² As a result, excessive nutrients like nitrogen in the water can cause a “dead zone”: oxygen-deficient areas in which nothing can live. In March 2004, the UN Environment Program published its first Global Environment Outlook Yearbook in which it reported 146 dead zones in the world's oceans where marine life could not be supported due to depleted oxygen levels. Some of these zones were as small as a square kilometer (0.4 mi²), but the largest dead zone covered 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 mi²). A study in 2008, four years later, reported a total of 405 dead zones worldwide;^13,14
• Nutrient pollution in the air also causes acid rain which in turn affects lakes, forests and animals.¹⁵ Acid rain has very damaging effects on life on land and below water. A healthy lake, for example, has a pH of 6.5 or higher. Acid rain causes the pH to fall below 5, which is detrimental to fish life. At a pH below 4, the lake is biologically dead.¹⁶ Some lakes in Sweden have become so acidic that they are no longer able to support fish life.^1...