SIX

Beyond Sustainablity

The Spectrum of Climate Impacts

Imagine a world

in which people (in a messy and haphazard way) figure out how to equalize the balance between production and consumption. Circular design on a global scale will revolutionize the throwaway society of 2023. Symbiosis and regeneration will be credible mantras. Offices around the world will know their carbon allotment and use AI to keep track of their goals. Giving up some privacy for individuals will be necessary to create a better climate balance. PPP—People Planet Prosperity—will express the intention and direction of change.

A Regenerative Office
Illustration by Dustin Jacobus from Belgium.
After reading this chapter, consider how you might illustrate your story about the Spectrum of Climate Impacts.

This chapter builds on chapter 5 to go deeper on what we feel is the dominant outcome to be concerned about over the next decade, epic climate emergencies. Certainly, there are many urgent futures to be concerned about, but regenerating life on this planet is so very basic. Office buildings in the past have been more the source of climate problems than solutions. Office shock has created new opportunities to do much better.

FIGURE 10: Spectrum of Climate Impacts

Epic Climate Emergencies

Around the world, people are already experiencing chronic climate emergencies such as droughts,¹ increasing food insecurity, wildfires, and decreasing biodiversity with entire species disappearing. Infrastructure at risk includes airports, hospitals, police stations, power stations, schools, hazardous waste sites, and military bases. Climate is now a global security issue. These dangers go even beyond the damage to the planet, including conflicts between countries, rising numbers of climate refugees, and state competition over resources.² Above us, satellite and debris pollution in space is already a problem affecting the international viability of low earth orbit.

We are at the intersection of major climate-related disruptions in animal and insect populations, human health, and land use. We know that people, organizations, and offices that cause emission of greenhouse gases create costs for everyone on the planet. Although the super-rich may pine for another planet and tech leaders may seek refuge in the metaverse, mother earth is going to be our home for the foreseeable future. The cost will be highest for those who consume the least. Future generations will pay the most.

Spanning the Spectrum of Climate Impacts, as illustrated in figure 10, will not be easy. The UK Design Council offers a systemic design approach to go Beyond Net Zero, but more than methods will be required.³ Booker Prize nominee Amitav Ghosh frames our challenge well:

When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement, they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. . . . But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable—for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.⁴

Climate-Negative Supply Chains

In the corporate real estate industry, architect Frank Duffy argued that the root cause of climate abuse by offices is the office supply chain and its incentives. Facility managers should be rewarded for maintaining highly sustainable environments, not merely reducing costs. Design and construction professionals should be rewarded for making the most imaginative and efficient use of existing spaces, rather than for new building. Finance and development providers should be rewarded for sustainably managing what exists already, rather than new ventures.

There is so much that we can all do to improve the regenerative capabilities of offices. Critical choices must be made to change consumption, produce with circularity, and regenerate the planet. Office shock could be a much-needed spark for the choices about our future that could rein in impending disasters. Office shock is an opportunity to reverse the many unsuccessful attempts at doing the right thing, and the window of opportunity is closing quickly.

As we were writing this book, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, reacted to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report published on April 4, 2022.⁵ He said the report reveals “a litany of broken climate promises” by governments and businesses. He even accused many of lying when claiming to be on track to limiting future heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. In a strongly worded rebuke, he said: “It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world.” It’s “now or never” if the world is to stave off climate disaster.⁶

While technical solutions are necessary, they are an insufficient condition to bringing about a change in behavior. To have an effect, we will need to change minds and systems. A climate positive future will need to incorporate social, economic, political, and cultural changes. The Spectrum of Climate Impacts addresses this urgent need and provides a way to examine the span of choices from net-zero, where people and offices do not contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases, to Regenerative, where active steps can be taken to cultivate and renew the resources of our planet. Finding the harmony of choices that will enable you to fight in this battle for survival is critical to a better future.

Offices and officing have an opportunity to be an important catalyst in climate choices. Buildings and their construction are among the largest contributors to global resource use.

In considering the opportunity offices can play in changing the narrative for a better future, Duffy offered a stark indictment of traditional offices:

The Taylorist office building has been a perfect machine for delivering environmental degradation because it’s so completely the product of supply side thinking which overrides user interests, ignores the public good and takes no account of collateral damage.⁷

A sustainable future requires making choices today to make a climate-positive impact. The office can be the place where organizations converge on a shared purpose of sustainability. To take advantage of the opportunity of office shock, we can think futureback to change consumption, produce with circularity, and regenerate the planet.

To Consume or Not to Consume?

The choices each person can make to reduce greenhouse gases are plentiful, but many of those choices are painful. Individuals can try to eliminate all plastic in daily life, for example, but plastic presence is nearly everywhere. Many of today’s recycling efforts simply move the problem to another location. Driving or sharing an all-electric vehicle uses a battery containing unsustainably mined materials. Electric usage in homes is only as efficient as the grid it is connected to. Building housing that uses geothermal energy for heating and cooling will still create emissions in the construction process. The choices of what we consume, and how often, are only as effective as the organizations that provide the products.

Organizations also are able to decrease their carbon footprints in their offices through a variety of options. For example, they can allow knowledge workers to work from home to reduce commuting. They can choose building materials that sequester carbon while using HVAC systems with alternative energy sources like geothermal. They can educate and incentivize employees to be regenerators rather than mindless consumers.

Although the consumption choices for organizations have similarities to consumer choices, there is a very important difference. In the office, our business choices are influenced by the drive to prosper, succeed, and win. The question now, in the face of the degradation of our planet, is how organizations can choose sustainable options rather than those based purely on consumption underlying growth.

The climate crisis should encourage us to make more conscious choices about consumption. If individuals begin to see themselves as part of a larger community that shares the bounty of the earth without destroying it for future generations, then organizations that seek to fulfill every desire may consider more consciously their role in the value chain.

A Circular Economy

People will need to choose between unfettered consumption and the more sustainable choices of extending the life of our possessions through repair, reuse, donation, and recycling. Thinking futureback, we will all ask ourselves: Where do our products come from, and how far up the value chain are they truly sustainable? What happens after we purchase and use a product, and can it contribute to a new product or experience for someone else?

According to the World Economic Forum’s definition, a circular economy is an industrial system that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design. It replaces the end-of-life concept with restoration, shifts toward the use of renewable energy, eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, which impair reuse and return to the biosphere, and aims for the elimination of waste through the superior design of materials, products, systems, and business models.⁸ In the near future, the internet of everything will provide data that will make the circularity of products, from cradle to rebirth, completely and cheaply visible.

Futurist William Gibson made it clear how important it will be for local, regional, and global communities to make major changes in our behavior around the effects of climate change:

All imagined futures lacking recognition of anthropogenic climate change will increasingly seem absurdly shortsighted. Virtually the entire genre will be seen to have utterly missed the single most important thing we were doing with technology.⁹

Our children—and especially our grandchildren—will ask, “What were they thinking? Why didn’t they do something about climate emergencies?” The most basic strategic choice is about the range of circularity. In a hyperconnected world, circular production is not enough. Most global companies have global supply chains, so they have visibility on the raw materials and how they are sourced. Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) will be the baseline in setting priorities for the range of products and services. These criteria are a set of standards for a company’s operations that socially conscious investors use to screen potential investments. Environmental criteria consider how a company performs as a steward of nature. Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities where it operates. Governance deals with a company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights. These criteria are becoming an increasingly popular way for investors to evaluate companies as well as avoid investing in companies that might pose risks to their own criteria.

In addition, the way a product is handed over to a consumer influences the choices of business models. Ownership of a product versus renting it to the consumer will influence the business models as offices transition to more sustainable practices. Across all industries more strategic choices will need to be made to fight climate change. In the automotive industry, more local transportation, sharing and climate-friendly mobility infrastructure will rebalance ownership with exclusivity to sharing and inclusivity. For example, BedZED¹⁰ in the United Kingdom is a large-scale, mixed-use, zero-carbon community that was built sustainably and includes homes and office space. One of the amenities is a car club where cars are available for the residents to share, thereby reducing vehicle ownership. The notion and need for ownership are choices underlying circularity.

New Ownership Models

Thinking futureback, we will need to view our products like our pets—something you own for its lifetime. Just as any person should carefully consider the act of acquiring a pet and its long-term consequences, we will need to start thinking the same way for every product we acquire. Ownership of goods can remain with the producer, with responsibility to resell, recycle, or even repurpose.

In a sustainable future, new business models will need to make a strategic choice: control the linearity of the value chain or move toward a more circular business model. The latter contains a business model choice: produce only when necessary, and offer to repair, recover, recycle, or even better, reuse the basic materials.¹¹

For example, jeans have had a negative impact on the environment due to the large amounts of water and energy used in the manufacturing process. In addition, the way jeans are designed makes it difficult to remake and recycle them. For the fashion industry, redesigning this iconic fashion staple became the perfect starting point on the journey toward more circularity. Together with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the Jeans Redesign initiative brought together sixty collaborators and competitors across the jeans value chain to create the standards to transform the way jeans are made.¹² The resulting guidelines for brands, mills, and manufacturers has become “a blueprint for collective action to scale circular practices.”¹³

Another example of circular design is Chikatai, a company located in the country of Georgia:

Chikatai launched its Toy Hospital, with the aim to raise awareness about overconsumption and encourage customers to fix rather than discard their soft toys, promoting responsible consumption through reducing post-consumer waste. They also developed a recycled line of baby décor and toys, where pre-consumer waste from the cutting stage and leftover fabrics from other companies are collected and given a new life.¹⁴

The new business models will trigger another choice, do we continue to compete, or can we cooperate? Thinking futureback, with the shared vision of “People Planet Prosperity” and enabled by technology, we envision new partnerships flourishing across the entire value web, not just supply chains but also customer and consumer relationships.

Needed: More Regenerative Communities

Climate change requires us to imagine how we can work together to create a more sustainable society. Indeed, sustainability is focused on eliminating carbon emissions and is dependent on an economy that is circular. However, sustainability needs to be much broader than this functional focus. Climate change is a systemic problem, and the solution will only emerge when all community members can thrive, not just survive. As architect Bill Reed wrote in 2007:

Sustainability is a progression towards a functional awareness that all things are connected; that the systems of commerce, building, society, geology, and nature are really one system of integrated relationships; that these systems are co-participants in the evolution of life.¹⁵

A regenerative economy promotes care rather than carelessness, cooperation rather than competition, creating abundance rather than depleting resources. It necessitates making choices to avoid the tragedy of the commons.¹⁶

The signals of regeneration are multiplying. More consumers are looking for locally grown, locally produced products and services. The intrinsic value of a product or service is increased when a good or service is exchanged between people—there is a deeper connection in the exchange. A connection with the brand is made, which is in many ways higher than the profit margin. While globalization has had the benefit of increasing choice for many people, it does not always increase value. Localization can often add much greater value, in addition to supporting individual and organizational values.

Communities thrive when living and working complement each other. This is the goal in Tottenville, a community on Staten Island in New York City to re-empower the local community by attracting and building mutually beneficial businesses. Seeds of regeneration are being planted that include a new marine economy and urban farming.¹⁷

This initiative takes advantage of natural assets such as its seaside location and open space that can be developed into sustainable farming. Tottenville also has a rich history of successful small businesses. The Tottenville plan brings together production and consumption in the local community and provides for investment in a marine economy that can benefit the New York City metropolitan area.

In the wake of office shock, community members can benefit, and policy makers will have more opportunities to converge on a shared path toward collective climate change. Office shock opens an opportunity to swing the pendulum back to give more agency to communities.

An example of where government is taking powerful and creative action to confront climate change is provided by Chile, where the process of mining lithium has had extensive negative effects on the environment in the Atacama Desert in the north. Mining is affecting water levels, salinity, and temperature, which are all affecting the people who live in the area and threatening wildlife, triggering a national reinvention:

After months of protests over social and environmental grievances, 155 Chileans have been elected to write a new constitution amid what they have declared a “climate and ecological emergency.” Their work will not only shape how this country of 19 million is governed. It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains.¹⁸

Those writing the new constitution will address the negative impacts and the potential economic value, and will most likely redefine “water.” Indeed, designing and cultivating a regenerative culture requires a new language to tell a story of co-creating a new balance between the inherent selfishness of individual consumption and the unselfishness of community prosperity. This is futureback thinking at its finest: envisioning a future of economic value in harmony with regenerating the environment and creating the legal structure to enable it all.

Regenerative culture encourages shared stories that increase awareness of one another.¹⁹ Whether through religious rituals or ethnic narratives, members can generate new connections and new levels of trust. As practitioners of regenerative practices, they tackle the challenge of unequal distribution of resources with a shared vision of what a regenerative future looks and feels like.

Regenerative Systems

Spanning the Spectrum of Climate Impacts reveals the importance of learning from ecology, and being inspired by its interworking, to create better futures for working and living.

A Systems View of Offices and Officing

In Capra and Luisi’s masterwork The Systems View of Life,²⁰ life is described within a framework with four dimensions: biological, cognitive, social, and ecological.

Building on the work of cognitive biology and sociology, this book posits that life is a system capable of producing and maintaining itself. Like the homeostasis of our bodies, our planetary environment is homeostatic, maintaining temperature and atmospheric composition, despite changing conditions. Our planet’s regulatory system is surprisingly like the regulatory system of the human body. A regenerative strategy is self-creating, and the spectrum is not only about what we do in the environment but also about how we can gain inspiration from the environment. Embracing the complexities and dynamics of living organizations should encourage a shift in how we organize ourselves. For example, biomimicry is a growing design movement that “learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges—and find hope.”²¹ Biomimicry applies an empathetic, interconnected understanding of how life works “to not only learn from nature’s wisdom, but also heal ourselves—and this planet—in the process.”²²

Another example is the work of Chinese ecological urbanist and architect Kongjian Yu.²³ To deal with the increasing problem of flooding, Yu designed Sponge Cities for urban environments.²⁴ His design allows water to filter through the ground by absorbing rainwater like a sponge, rather than trying to keep it out. The water is then naturally filtered by the soil and allowed to reach urban aquifers, where it can easily be treated and used for the city water supply. All human networks, including offices and officing, have the capacity for regeneration.

Sustainability Will Not Be Enough

Daniel Christian Wahl takes this argument further: “Sustainability is not enough: we need regenerative cultures. A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient, and adaptable; that cares for the planet, and that cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity.”²⁵

The MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative routinely polls business leaders about progress in their firms toward embracing sustainability. Despite a plethora of companies with good intentions,²⁶ the unwelcome news delivered by Jon Sterman, cofounder of the initiative, is:

companies issue reports through public or government relations departments, engage in sustainability activities only when they believe it is profitable, or comply with applicable environmental laws and regulations—nothing more.²⁷

The transition from today’s attitudes to our aspirational scenario of planet regeneration highlights the massive worldwide cooperation required. Urgent choices must be made by individuals, offices, and communities to change consumption, produce with circularity, and regenerate the planet.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, it would seem we are challenged as a society to see a shared vision of a regenerative future. Perhaps we can draw inspiration from those who have found belonging through their relationship to the environment. Perhaps the Spectrum of Climate Impacts can open the conversation, explore the polarities, and help to harmonize solutions for workers and their offices.

No single government, company, or person can achieve the goal alone. Despite the challenges of establishing “ecological diplomacy,”²⁸ according to the MIT Technology Review, in 2022 many nations and territories are on the path toward a Green Future.²⁹ With Environmental, Social, and Governance regulations on the horizon in many countries, organizations³⁰ have to begin the transition to more sustainable business practices.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals offer a global opportunity to bridge national differences with flexive intent to adopt planet-friendly practices. Three of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals focus on climate issues. Others connect to climate by advocating good health and well-being, reducing poverty, and creating sustainable communities. They all aim to guide humanity toward a better future (See “Office Shock Navigational Stars” at the back of the book for details of the climate-oriented SDGs #13, #14, and #15).

What will guide our great transition from a world that consumes more than it can sustainably produce to one of worldwide cooperation and symbiosis as in our aspirational scenario at the start of the chapter? The record to date is not promising, and the Spectrum of Climate Impacts is central to creating a just world and a healthy regenerating planet.

As two of the authors of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords said in their book The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis:

When you are faced with the hard realities, look at them with clarity, but also know that you are incredibly lucky to be alive at a time when you can make a transformative difference to the future of all life on earth.³¹

Your Choices on the Spectrum of Climate Impacts

As you think about your own personal story across this spectrum, consider these questions:

1. How might you illustrate your story about a future with more positive climate impacts?

2. How has the question of “to consume or not to consume” affected your behavior and that of your organization? How might you change your practices to become more sustainable?

3. How do you see yourself participating in the circular economy?

4. How can offices and officing contribute to restoring the planet and increasing its regenerative capacity?

5. How can we get the world working on a more cooperative basis to prevent planetary destruction?

6. How can we convince organizations—particularly corporations—that they have a huge role to play in climate regeneration and that in the long run it will enhance their business performance?