Building back ecological resilience is an urgent collaboration challenge

“In the 21^st century, there are cameras everywhere except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes (Ziya Tong 2019)”

The pandemic has shed light on many of the blind spots Tong discusses in her book ‘The Reality Bubble’. From the perspective of an enterprise, COVID19 has raised questions about economic resilience of our value chains: where the materials are made and by whom, how the goods are transported and what our contingency plans are. This, however, is not enough. Real resilience is also about seeing our dependence on a healthy climate and ecosystems, both on land and below water. I call this ecological resilience, and it is built by addressing questions like this:

What is the impact of increasing temperatures on our business? Or more frequent floods?
How will desertification impact our operation?
What is the root cause of the risk we are facing?

Enterprises that answer the last question honestly have the possibility of truly building back resilience in its ecological sense. The authors of the world’s most comprehensive planetary health check say that the fast declines in our life-support systems, our planet and climate, are likely to lead to more perturbations like COVID19. There are many reasons for this, such as the fact that losing trees and forests leads to more contact between us and animals. This, in turn, makes us more exposed to disease that spreads from animals to humans. To protect ourselves from the spread of zoonotic disease[1], we need to keep natural habitats and species intact. The message from scientists is clear: healthy ecosystems are the foundation for public health. Protecting our health will require restoring and protecting our climate and ecosystems, at scale.

Building back resilience to protect people, planet and prosperity is an urgent collaboration challenge. For any organisation, it starts with coming together to reimagine ourselves as ecologically regenerative enterprises. What will your operation look like, within the boundaries of our planet? Managing a transition to a resilient future will require organisations to drive dialogue and collaboration on three levels:

• Within organisations: Align behind new principles and/or business models, and embed these into operations and decisions
• Along value chains: Align, innovate and adapt with partners across their end-to-end value chains to reduce exposure to economic and ecological risks
• Sectors: Work in partnership across the playing field to understand system level dependencies, raise collective ambitions and align on best practice

Now that many of us are nearing the time to start to recover, speed is essential to succeed. Short-term metrics will be used to measure how we recover. But, let’s slow down enough to not forget the vulnerabilities that hid in our blind spots, and address the root causes. The city of Amsterdam is leading the way in what this can look like at a system level. The city leadership has adopted the UN sustainable development goals and planetary boundaries to guide its decision-making, to ensure its economy meets everyone’s basic needs without degrading ecological resilience.

As igniters of change, the ASE has an ambition work with our partners to manage organisational and value chain transitions in a way that considers future generations. It will take huge courage, imagination and leadership to adapt and thrive in a net zero, circular economy[2]. To get to a sustainable future state, we need to work together more than ever.

[1] Disease caused by a pathogen that has jumped from an animal to a human

[2] Circular economy, an emerging alternative to the current linear economy, can be defined as a system in which materials hold value for longer, by being designed to last longer, through repair, reuse and/or reprocessing.

Author

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Anja Liski

ASE Co-Facilitator

Anja is a Co-Facilitator in the UK ASE. She is an ecologist by training and holds a PhD in Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences.