Top economists gathered at the Wharton School's Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania April 12-13, 2012 for the second annual Globalization TrendLab 2012 conference entitled, "Sustainability: New Perspectives and Opportunities."
The conference brought together economic and environmental experts from management, engineering, environmental policy, public policy, and the social sciences to learn from each other's perspectives on environmental sustainability.
You read that right, economists, policy makers and social scientists all in one place to talk about sustainability. It's a Perfect Storm of knowing nothing about how the world actually works.
Environmental sustainability identifies courses of action for the use of natural resources without placing onerous limitations on the availability of those resources in the future - in order words, they exist to ban and ration. It's been a topic of debate among policymakers, environmental advocates and business leaders, of which only one of those groups really cares about people.
Green business practices were beginning to play an increasingly important role, but business is still trying to gauge how much people will spend for feeling good. All of the low-flow toilets in the world are nice, but 96% of water is used for agriculture, so how much should people spend on a toilet? "In surveys, most corporate CEOs say they care about sustainability and are taking steps, however small, that make a difference. Yet, they are deluding themselves," says John Elkington, founding partner and CEO of Volans, who gives talks to real CEOs about their corporate responsibility and sustainable development. "We do not need incremental change but a systemic transformation applied over a wide scope, not a narrow scope, of problems."
"The most fundamental challenge for sustainability, however, is the number of people on the planet. We all need water, food, and energy," said Hania Zlotnik, former director of the United Nations Population Division. "By 2050, there may be just over 9 billion human beings living on Earth, but keeping population growth to that level requires substantial reductions of fertility in low- income countries. Yet many governments of countries where the population is still growing fast think they have other more pressing problems to worry about and have failed to invest enough in expanding access to family planning so that all people have the means to have no more than the children they want."
Environmental disasters have also helped shape the conversation about sustainability and society's responses. They have triggered a vast array of government and corporate responses and have contributed to the debate over the concept of the "triple bottom line," an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring economic, ecological, and social success.
"Disasters are tragedies, but they help wake us up," says Andrew Hoffman, a professor at the University of Michigan. "In the 1960s, a series of environmental disasters led to the first debates about sustainability, then focused strictly on environmental issues. Then regulators stepped in and that put the issue on corporate radar screens. Things quieted down until Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez. This opened up a second phase during which corporations realized that they could strategize, they could redesign products and processes to cope with the challenges of sustainability. We should think about sustainability as part of a progression of social and cultural change that has gone through a process of punctuated equilibrium with disruptive disasters triggering new waves of sustainability thought and practice."
Another topic in the analysis of sustainability is that of governance and how institutions need to encourage sustainability worldwide and to improve collaboration among governments, companies, and nonprofit organizations.
"Multiplicity of players, different agendas, and varying strategies can be a challenge, but also an opportunity to do things differently," says William Clark, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. "Current arrangements to accomplish together what you can't do alone in the field of sustainability are flawed and structurally misfit. There is a presumption that one can make progress by enlisting a sufficiently large number of countries. But each country has other agendas in addition to the one being negotiated. What we need is to assume that government is a complex, adaptive system. We must lay down barriers to the serious negative externalities and encourage innovation and diffusion."