To create a sustainable and living future we need to address and ultimately eliminate the full range of adverse impacts currently arising in our society and environment that prevent people from being able to meet their needs and apply increasing pressure on resource availability and ecosystem health. This, fundamentally, is the challenge of sustainable development. And the solution lies in influencing current social and economic systems towards a sustainable paradigm.
- Watch this short video of Peter Senge, a world-renowned expert on systems thinking who is recognised as one of the four people who has had the greatest influence on business strategy over the last 100 years.
- Reflect on these questions:
- What social systems are you part of?
- What economic systems are you part of?
- What unintended adverse consequences in those systems can you identify?
- How might people work collectively and intelligently to avoid some of the adverse consequences you have identified? And, what might you have done to increase the possibility of achieving an improved outcome?
- Write your answers in WEnotes:
Learning journal activity
This activity is required for students seeking formal credit. Other students may complete a learning journal but it will not be assessed.
- Consider how well you understand some of the systems that you believe are responsible for current unsustainable outcomes, for example:
- CO2 emissions from vehicles affecting the climate system; or
- nitrogen run-off from farmland affecting the freshwater system; or
- the growing gap between rich and poor affecting the social system.
- What is fundamentally driving these undesirable outcomes?
- Note your thoughts in your learning journal.
