A walk on the wild side: Diagrams of Sustainability 401 through 435

More for the list.

401. Metamap (Ray Maher, Samuel Mann et al. 2018)

MetaMAP is an interactive graphical tool which supports collaborative investigation and design for achieving SDGs. It helps diverse users to integrate their thinking, understand sustainability challenges holistically, and develop well-integrated solutions. In brief, the structure and application of the MetaMAP framework help users gain insight by seeing relationships among parts of the natural environment, built environment and society across multiple spatial and temporal scales. It provides an inclusive framework to help people from different backgrounds integrate their diverse perspectives on sustainability issues into a common understanding. Armed with this holistic perspective, guided process help users to identify points of leverage and design well-integrated sustainability initiatives.

402. Satellites (Stilianakis et al. 2005)

Conceptual model for sustainable development, including environmental health and air pollution. This frame-work for the science/policy interface and  policy building includes three different perspectives: ecology, economy and human /social. Their dynamic interaction includes institutional and actor elements, and ultimately leads to decision-making on a target quality of life

403.  Minor’s Sustainability Framework

405. 5 pillars wrapped in scenarios and technology  (Prosuite)

406. SSS Bubbles – Sustainability, Science, Society. (McGill)

407. ChildFair State tree (Children England 2018)

The diagram shows how we see the ‘branches’ of the welfare state informed by a child-centred version of Maslow’s five needs, and fed by the ‘roots’ of a sustainable economy and environment, and authentic democracy and human rights.

Our inquiry will involve testing the branches of the current welfare state to see how well they deliver on children’s need for home, safety and security, love and belonging, health, and purpose – and how new policies and practices could be designed and structured to enable them to do this better.

408.  Ball and cup (Steffen et al. 2016)

409. Ball and Cup over time (Steffen et al. 2016)

A ball-and-cup depiction of a regime shift. The cup on the right represents a stable basin of attraction (the Holocene) and the orange ball, the state of the Earth System. The cup on the left and the pink ball represent a potential state (the Anthropocene) of the Earth System. Under gradual anthropogenic forcing, the cup becomes shallower and finally disappears (a threshold, ca. 1950), causing the ball to roll to the left (the regime shift) into the trajectory of the Anthropocene toward a potential future basin of attraction. The symbol í µí¼ represents the response time of the system to small perturbations.

410. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene (Steffen 2018)

Stability landscape showing the pathway of the Earth System out of the Holocene and thus, out of the glacial–interglacial limit cycle to its present position in the hotter Anthropocene. The fork in the road in Fig. 1 is shown here as the two divergent pathways of the Earth System in the future (broken arrows). Currently, the Earth System is on a Hothouse Earth pathway driven by human emissions of
greenhouse gases and biosphere degradation toward a planetary threshold at ∼2 °C (horizontal broken line at 2 °C in Fig. 1), beyond which the system follows an essentially irreversible pathway driven by intrinsic biogeophysical feedbacks. The other pathway leads to Stabilized Earth, a pathway of Earth System stewardship guided by human-created feedbacks to a quasi-stable, human-maintained basin of attraction. “Stability” (vertical axis) is defined here as the inverse of the potential energy of the system. Systems in a highly stable state (deep valley) have low potential energy, and considerable energy is required to move them out of this stable state. Systems in an unstable state (top of a hill) have high potential energy, and they require only a little additional energy to push them off the hill and down toward a valley of lower potential energy

410.  Ball and cup sustainable option (A)  (Steffen et al. 2016)

The scenario in Figure  6a is broadly consistent with the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2015 Paris climate targets and is based on rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and a radical turnaround in human exploitation of the biosphere. In this scenario, we assume that the climate is significantly warmer than that of the Holocene, but remains in more intense interglacial conditions with most of the Antarctic ice sheet intact; here the intensity of an interglacial is defined by a range of indicators representing different aspects of the Earth System (e.g., proxies for insolation, astronomical parameters, maximum CO2 and CH4 concentrations, global average surface temperature anomaly.  In this putative state of the Earth System, biodiversity does not decline much with respect to current conditions.

411.  (enough of the balls and cups. How about…) A fractal tree.  (Balgojevic 2015).

Tree of multidimensional sustainability”: conceptual dynamic model of a sustainable society based on cybernetic systems and fractal models.

412. Threats or opportunities (Schulte and Hallstedt 2018)

413. Chassis framework  (Calfresh Schools)

414. 9 economies (Matrix-Q)

415. Matrix-Q’s timeline.  Where we are and where we think we are.(Matrix-Q)

416. Convergence of epistemological currents of sustainability (Cisneros 2015)

417.  Ribbons!  (Australian Sustainability Curriculum Framework)

418. Tropophillic (Sustainable Systems International)

Tropophilia is the ability to thrive on uncertainty and chaos, i.e., going beyond resilience and antifragility.

419. Triple Responsibility of an Enterprise (S = Subject of Responsibility)  (Schüz 2016)

420.  Model of Sustainable Corporate Responsibility (SCR)  (Schüz 2016)

421. Schwartz values extended to sustainability (Education for Sustainability on outer ring)  (src)

422. Quintuple Helix.  Triple helix of innovation (government + education + industry) + society (quadruple) plus environment. (Carayannis 2012 who lists lots of other versions).

423. Triple helix (innovation’s govt, uni & industry) stemming from Barbier’s Venn (econ, eco, soc) (Scalia 2018)

(why? surely not just because the both have three and you can extrude a sort-of-helix from the intersection?) OK, is explained here…

In Fig. 1, focus is on interaction among the three dimensions represented as a ‘helix’ whose dynamic changes over time modifying the dimensions of the spheres by impacting on economy, environment and society. The model focuses on
the interaction between the roles and actions of key actors that are responsible of relevant effects on the three dimensions of sustainability. In particular:

Intersection between society and environment: ‘governing’ actors, typically policy makers, but also associations and other organizations capable of influencing government decisions, are responsible for defining rules and constraints to comply with when using the resources that are available within the general environment; hence, in this area, the set of necessities as what is necessary to protect the  equilibrium of the three dimensions of sustainability, is defined;
Intersection between society and economy: ‘thinking’ actors, typically the scientific, academic and education world leading the knowledge creation processes, given
the set of available resources, on the one hand, and the defined rules and constraints, on the other hand, are responsible of defining/creating the possibilities in terms of all the possible evolutionary paths of development that can be followed;
Intersection between economy and environment: ‘economic’ actors, starting from all the possible development trajectories identified by the thinking actors, selects those
more feasible and profitable to develop effective solutions, so complying with the necessity of harmonizing the social, economic and environmental dimensions of
sustainability (effectiveness).

424. Bounded economy of capabilities for flourishing  (Jackson 2012)

425.  Bounded Population-Economic-Ecological System for Sustainable Human Development (Adapted from Jackson by Gutiérrez 2016)

There are three sets of feedback loops: human development, human adaptation, and industrial mitigation. The human development loops (yellow arrows) improve gender equality and other human capabilities, and guide the allocation of income/commodities generated by the economic system. The human adaptation loops (red arrows) drive ecological investment so as to enhance the sustainability of ecosystem services. The industrial mitigation loops (green arrows) improve the productivity of energy and other resources by using “industrial engineering” methods. The working hypothesis is that mitigation loops are helpful as long as their operation is subservient to, and do not interfere with, the human development and human adaptation loops.

The convergence of gender balance, energy balance, and sustainability emerges from gender imbalance and energy imbalance jointly driving human civilization toward unsustainability. Many other factors are involved, but gender and energy imbalances are the most pervasive, and balancing them would have a neutralizing effect on all the other factors that conspire against a sustainable human society. If the transition from consumerism to sustainability is to be attained in a timely and civilized manner, i.e., before it is too late and minimizing violence as much as possible, balancing gender relations and energy flows would be the best (perhaps the only?) way to go.

426.  Future world human system further enhanced to show self-correcting environmental and financial management loops (Gutiérrez 2016)

Based on “present world system” (based on Fey and Lam, #427)

427.  Ecocosm Paradox (Fey and Lam 1999)

Both population and per capita consumption have positive feedback loops that force them to grow.  Population growth is driven by a natural reproduction loop (upper right) and a biotechnology loop that extends life expectancy (middle right).  Per capita consumption growth is caused by technology loops (middle left) reinforced by world economics and government action loops (far left).

These major loops arise in our society from human needs and motivations (bottom).

Environmental collapse, resource exhaustion, and toxic pollution constraints may create negative loops that will finally stop the growth (small loops in the very middle).

428.  Leverage Points (Fischer 2019 after Abson 2017 after Meadows 1999)

430.  Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (GAHI) scaling framework (Lesley Bourns and Dan McClure 2019)

(strictly, this focusses on the narrow sustainability of innovation interpretation of sustainability.  But McClure describes his work as Humanitarian Innovation, and I think we can learn from this model, I’ll let it through).

The GAHI framework breaks the scaling challenge into four major parts; Value Creation, Difficult Barriers, Sustainability, and Contextual Variation.   Using this model, it is possible to structure and compare much of the one-off learning that has happened since 2015, consolidating progress on a host of different aspects of the scaling challenge:

1.    Define Varied Paths to Scale:  This work can include poorly understood challenges such as scaling product innovations in resource poor environments and scaling complex system solutions.

2.    Solve the Hard Problems:  Some specific barriers to scale are particularly difficult to navigate, such as finding business models when the users of the innovation lack funds.

3.    Integrate Supporting Tools:  There are a growing number of scaling tools for jobs such as assessing scaling readiness.   It should now be possible to see how these overlap with one another, where there are gaps, and how new tools might be developed.

431. Resilience as function of adaptive cycle (Lister 2016)

Resilience has origins across at least four disciplines of research and application: psychology, disaster relief and military defense, engineering, and ecology. A scan of resilience policies (see http://resilient-cities.iclei.org/) reveals that the concept is widely and generally defined with reference to several of the origin fields, and universally focuses on the psychological trait of being flexible and adaptable; having the capacity to deal with stress; the ability to “bounce back” to a known normal condition following periods of stress; to maintain well-being under stress; and to be adaptable when faced with change or challenges. However, the use of resilience in this generalised context begs important operational questions of how much change is tolerable, which state of “normal” is desirable and achievable, and under what conditions it is possible to return to a known “normal” state. In policies that hinge on these broadly defined, psycho-social aspects of resilience, there is little or no explicit recognition that adaptation and flexibility may in fact result in transformation—and thus, require the adaptive and transformative capacity that is ultimately necessary at some scale in the face of radical, large-scale and sudden systemic change.

432.  Window of opportunity for reorganization and new trajectories (In the context of New Orleans)  (Oliver 2013)

433. Four Es of sustainability in engineering  – and their conflicts (Basu 2015)

434. Vision for creating sustainable social-ecological and social-technical system (Beiji 2015)

A vision for creating sustainable social-ecological and social-technical systems a global view of resilience is presented

435. From problematic dichotomies to  interconnectedness (Lehtonen 2018)