Anatomy of Sustainable Decision-Making

Traditionally socio-economic systems have been caught up in the adversarial "economy versus environment" debate, operating in a linear direction -- taking resources from the Earth, making them into products, and throwing them away to produce large amounts of waste (take-make-waste). As we have learned from the principles of The Natural Step, this can result in communities being unsustainable.

Individuals, companies, product producers, and community builders are now beginning to re-define the economic equation in our society. Waste equals loss of energy, similar to the way that nothing is wasted by nature, is the formula that is beginning to close the loops in our thinking (biomimickry), and in doing so re-defining the way we live. We are however, early on the learning curve of mimicking the patterns of nature in our human settlements. For example, ours is the first generation to gain awareness that every community within the larger global community has an ecological footprint. Understanding the nature and limits of that footprint is to live in a sustainable manner.

Within the context of biomimickry, the idea of Industrial Ecology is now being seriously considered by many businesses as a holistic and integrative approach to the traditional take-make-waste practices. This idea uses the metaphor of metabolism to analyze production and consumption by industry, government, organizations and consumers, and the interactions between them. It involves tracking energy and material flows through industrial systems (e.g., a plant, region, or national or global economy), from the standpoint that instead of cradle to grave views, companies are now considering cradle to cradle perspectives, where waste from one process is food for another.

With these new approaches, sustainability becomes a yardstick for evaluating when collective human actions are endangering our relationship with nature -- or simply put, a measure of the impact of our social and economic present on the environmental future. Applying this yardstick to our activities challenges us to examine the important multi-dimensional links between human development and ecological systems. A multi-dimensional approach to sustainability is characterized by processes that

• develop local assets to revitalize economies,
• conserve natural resources,
• concurrently limit waste and pollution,
• improve the status of disadvantaged peoples,
• make valuable connections among people, and
• promote cooperation and efficiency.

Using tools like TNS and the lessons from the three over-lapping circles sustainability model, provides additional guidance and directions so the company's EMS now becomes an ESMS, and it can move beyond goals like compliance and incremental improvement, to support goals such as market leadership and improved competitiveness. Sustainable-based decision-making in an ESMS context considers the complexity of systems within the framework of adaptive management. An adaptive, learning based approach to decision-making implies developing, testing, and refining a common framework for learning from experience wherever promising approaches to problem-solving are undertaken. Adaptive management also suggests the constant attention to and evaluation (monitoring) of activities to ensure one's continuous awareness and understanding of changes in circumstances, in order to feed back information to decision making endeavors. Principles of adaptive management that can steer sustainable decision-making include the following.

1. Decision making processes should effectively integrate both long term and short term economic, environmental, social and equity considerations.
2. Conservation of biological diversity and ecological integrity should be a fundamental consideration in decision making.
3. Make decisions that anticipate & prevent, which is preferable to reaction and cure, in an effort to avoid problematic situations in the future, and remain consistent with inter generational equity.
4. Living off the interest to guarantee that the level of a resource will not fall below a threshold required to perpetuate this resource through all time should be a basic premise in decision-making.
5. Carry-on informed decision-making that takes into consideration the concept of an ecosystem approach.
6. Lack of full scientific certainty in making decisions, should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation if there are threats of serious or irreversible damage.
7. Net environmental gain (full-cost accounting) should be an objective of decision-making to insure that unavoidable or inevitable projects at a minimum guarantee environmental and social benefits.
8. Improved valuation, pricing, and incentive mechanisms should become second nature in decision-making in order to make the environment a forethought and not an afterthought.
9. Decision-making should encourage equitable distribution of resources to create a sense of fairness, identifying and satisfying real needs before wants and leaving options open for future generations.

Pursuing the guidance of the overlapping circles model and the TNS System Conditions through an adaptive management approach to decision-making, causes us to transform the rhetoric of sustainable development into actions. For example, applying the philosophy suggested by the overlap of the three circles as a template we can test one's operations and guarantee each act, project, or program implemented will concurrently address issues of environment, economics, and social well being. In this way one can ask of any project, program, or act:

• Does this activity provide an economic benefit? What is it?
• Does this activity provide an environmental benefit? What is it?
• Does this activity offer equal benefits to all sectors of society? What are some?
• Was this activity agreed to through the participation of all people (stakeholders) impacted by the activity?

If the answer to any one of these questions is NO, then the project, program, or act should be re-thought to better address the core principles of sustainability.