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SD Innovation home > innovative research Your research My research
Future research projects available for collaboration Words for the future. One of the reasons why policy-makers and the public are stuck in old ways of problem-solving is the old and limited language used to describe and analyse the problem. The language of incremental improvement is so pervasive that possibilities for preventive change is rarely considered. Every activity which implements sustainable devlopment is individually described, which locks most initiatives into solving interconnected problems as if they were separate. See the glossary for some suggested new terms, which require further research and publicity to be tested for effectiveness. More strategic strategy. It may be obvious that problems need to be solved at source and that change must apply to whole systems, not just the symptoms, but almost every sustainable development and waste strategy completely omits the strategic choice of preventing problems. As an example see the front of pipe pages describing conventional end of pipe waste strategy and its alternative. How does this single most strategic choice get left out and what can be done to introduce it? Climate change. Climate professionals hope that public awareness will raise after worsening climate disasters. Politicians hope the issue will just go away. I hope to create a new approach to climate change which focusses not on directly limiting emissions, but on changing the economic and cultural signals which perpetuate everyone's dependence upon fuels which become wastes. A single economic instrument could quickly prevent further accumulation of climate instability and also convert every economy into a source of resources rather than a source of wastes. My research will also aim to reveal the myth that a waste-based economy can create wealth or continue to provide economic growth. Sustainable production and consumption product labelling. Everyone wonders why everyone else isn't able to reduce waste. I wonder how a simple product labelling scheme could reveal to shoppers and corporate purchasers which products will become new resources and which are effectively already rubbish. Ecological product labels which attempt to calculate every impact are so complicated and expensive that they are impractical for wide application. However a label which identifies which products meet a maximum threshold for the risk that it becomes waste (rather than a new resource for nature or people) could be a clear and effective signpost to a sustainable economy. The challenge of public engagement. Raising awareness all too often translates into presenting lots of complex facts, worrying predictions and dull to-do lists. My experience over more than a decade suggests that negative information, predictions and even the word 'sustainability' are not needed to trigger a change of mindset. Specific problems need to be linked to a clear vision of the future and people need to be involved in defining this future. This project will propose the smallest volume of information needed to engage a group of people with a compelling vision of the future. Peace and cooperation. Is it coincidence that the global environment is worsening in parallel with violent conflicts and a wide range of other uncooperative behaviours? There are the obvious physical connections, such as competition for diminishing resources, but could a waste-creating world be inherently conflict-inducing at every level? Existing research needs to be pulled together and the evidence for simultaneous conflict-prevention and waste-prevention needs to be demonstrated to the public and policy-makers. A direct sustainability decision-guidance tool. Most tools guide decisions away from impacts to be avoided, which is the indirect approach to sustainability. This approach is equivalent to finding your way home by avoiding everyone else's house. Indirect decision tools are slow to apply, require expensive technical expertise and frequently fail to identify better options. Research is needed into the design of a decision tool which directly identifies compatibility with a sustainable (resource-making) economy and can graphically map out all available options and factors. Using a visual template, decisions can be planned, checked, discussed and presented with minimal specialist expertise. Training that runs and runs. The world has a limited number of sustainability trainers, who cannot possibly train everyone. The conventional model of trainers training trainees depends upon a large technical expertise which becomes an obstacle for trainees' capacity to use or pass on their learning. Further research is required into training methods which can proceed peer-to-peer through any size of organisation or any community, with minimal dependence on external experts. Attention is needed to the content and integrity of the material and the design of learning activities. Generic training methods can be adapted for use by groups with different priorities. A revolutionary economic instrument. National governments these days are slowly introducing different economic tools for different sustainability solutions, problems, sectors of society and products. The complexity is so immense that even specialist economists struggle to keep up, whilst the public and business suffer under growing burdens. Alternatively, a single generic economic instrument can act across a range of economic and sustainability issues and redefine capitalism 'as if the world matters'. Return to the top of this page Return to the SD Innovation homepage
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