Our current socio-ecological regime and its set of interconnected worldviews, institutions, and technologies all support the goal of unlimited growth of material production and consumption as a proxy for quality of life.

But, beyond a certain threshold, further material growth only marginally contributes to improvement in quality of life, even though this is humanity’s central goal.  

This goal is missed through pursuit of material growth, with mounting and abundant evidence that this pursuit creates significant roadblocks to sustainability through increasing inequality, resource constraints (i.e., peak oil, water limitations), and sink constraints (i.e., climate disruption, biodiversity loss, pollution).  

Overcoming these roadblocks and creating a sustainable and desirable future will require an integrated, systems level redesign of our socio-ecological regime and economic paradigm focused explicitly and directly on the goal of sustainable quality of life and well-being rather than the proxy of unlimited material growth. It will require the recognition and measurement of the substantial contributions of natural and social capital to well-being and its sustainment.   

This talk will discuss: (1) scenario planning (extended to include pubic opinion surveys) to build consensus on the future we want; (2) new indicators of progress toward these shared goals, with discussion of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (3) new institutions, policies, and civil society movements needed to achieve the future we want.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. Lets create the future we want.

Presenter bios:

Ida Kubisewski

Professor Ida Kubiszewski is an Associate Professor at Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.  She has been a climate change negotiator for the country of the Dominican Republic, and a delegate at the 19th through 21st Conference of Parties (COP19 in Warsaw, Poland in 2013; COP20 in Lima, Peru in 2014; and COP21 in Paris, France in 2015).

She is the founding managing editor and current co-editor-in-chief of magazine/journal hybrid called Solutions and a co-founder and former-managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Earth, an electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. She is the author or co-author of over a dozen scientific papers and five books, a Fellow at the National Council for Science and the Environment and Associate Research Fellow at the Institut Veblen pour les réformes économiques (Veblen Institute for Economic Reforms) in Paris, France. She contributes to the governance of the Ecosystem Service Partnership, the journal Ecosystem Services, and the Environmental Information Coalition, and is a member of the Club of Rome. Prof Kubiszewski received her B.A. in Astronomy and Physics from Boston University and her M.A. in Energy and Environmental Analysis through the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies also at Boston University. She received her PhD at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Vermont.

Robert Costanza

Professor Robert Costanza is a Vice Chancellor’s Chair in Public Policy at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. He is also currently a Senior Fellow at the National Council on Science and the Environment in the US, a Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Center, an Affiliate Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, a deTao Master of Ecological Economics at the deTao Masters Academy, China, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK).

His transdisciplinary research integrates the study of humans and the rest of nature to address research, policy and management issues at multiple time and space scales, from small watersheds to the global system. He is co-founder and past-president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and was founding editor of the society’s journal, Ecological Economics. He currently serves on the editorial board of ten other international academic journals. He is also founding co-editor in chief of Solutions (www.thesolutionsjournal.org) a unique hybrid academic/ popular journal.

Professor Costanza is the author or co-author of over 600 scientific papers and 27 books. His work has been cited in more than 20,000 scientific articles and he has been named as one of ISI’s Highly Cited Researchers since 2004 with an h-index of 63. More than 300 interviews and reports on his work have appeared in various popular media and he has written over 60 articles for the popular press.