3.1.Exploring pathways towards planetary well-being
3.1 Exploring pathways towards planetary well-being
There are no ready and certain pathways to a more sustainable future and planetary well-being. Knowing the objective is not a sufficient guide for how to act. Paths are created by walking, and no society has yet trodden a path to a future in which human well-being goals are achieved equitably while remaining within limits of ecological sustainability, which are usually crossed well before minimum limits of well-being are reached.
There are no straightforward and unambiguously best paths in the sustainability transition. The desirable options each have their own known challenges – for example, investments in cleaner technologies that no company will make because there are no economic benefits from the investment – and a number of unknown challenges, such as the side effects of disrupting systems. Different societies have their own strengths but also their own challenges and unique circumstances created by historical developments. This is why different countries, but also different regions and cities, have different opportunities for action. The same policies can therefore generate prosperity and new jobs here and unemployment and a loss of regional vitality there. For example, the dismantling of the coal industry turned out to be much more difficult in the Ruhr region of Germany than in the Saarland region, because the attraction of new livelihood and business opportunities and the diversification of the economic fabric were blocked by a series of lock-ins.
Many paths to a sustainable future need to be outlined, paths that work under different circumstances and also when challenges occur along the way. At the heart of the competence regarding sustainability transition is therefore an understanding of how to design and implement pathways for change: how to build workable pathways to planetary well-being and manage unintended impacts along the way? How to combine realism that encourages action in the present with sufficient openness to the fact that the future may be very different from what we can imagine now?
Scientific knowledge from different disciplines, brought together by inter- and transdisciplinary research, provides a map of the current situation and different visions of the future. For example, knowledge about the climate and biodiversity impacts of different activities, and about the sustainability and welfare impacts of different lifestyles and societal practices, create maps of the current state. Producing a comprehensive map requires both expertise from different disciplines and cross-disciplinary sustainability research. Similarly, scientific knowledge is effectively essential to clarify what kind of future state would help preserve the diversity of life on Earth and mitigate the effects of climate change.
However, scientific knowledge as such is only a collection of fragments of knowledge related to the state, functioning and interactions of different parts and processes of the existing or predicted or imagined world: they represent pictures of the world taken at different levels and with different tools. These fragments of information need to be interpreted and integrated in order to form a meaningful whole that provides information useful to human activity. Interpreting scientific data into a comprehensible whole that supports the promotion of sustainability transition requires scientific map literacy.
Adequate map literacy builds on an understanding of the functioning of Earth and human systems (see the Systems and planetary well-being course in this series) and on the nature of the different forms of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is inherently self-correcting and evolving over time, and it is usually not even possible, for example, for research on sustainability transition to produce rock-solid or immutable knowledge of the issue under investigation. However, in high-quality scientific research, the uncertainties and limitations concerning the results are clearly stated. The results form a kind of stream of information, which can be viewed to form a bigger picture.
For example, let’s consider the impact of the food system on climate change. Information on these impacts is produced at very different levels. The IPCC synthesis reports update the big picture on climate, and their statements are often accompanied by a specification of how much evidence there is to support the claim, how strong the consensus among scientists is, or how high the confidence of the claim is, with a scale from "very low confidence ... very high confidence". According to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report AR6, completed in 2022, 23–42% of global anthropogenic adverse climate impacts are related to food systems. The considerable variability is due, among other things, to the fact that there are many different ways of counting in the land-use changes related to agriculture. In any case, the figure shows that food systems are among the biggest sources of adverse climate impacts from human activities. The report also states that plant-based diets (with a low proportion of meat and dairy) are on average less damaging to the climate; for example, this statement is made with "high confidence". The climate impact of diets is largely related to the fact that meat from ruminant animals (such as cows, sheep and goats) in particular, and therefore also concentrated dairy products such as cheese, are food groups that are the most climate-damaging.
The validity of the big picture described above does not require that every possible research design on the climate impact of food or, for example, different feed mixes for cows or dishes served at restaurants will produce the same results. Each of the many choices about research design will have some influence on the results obtained, and the unambiguously best calculation methods are not always standardized into a so-called gold standard. Furthermore, the validity of the big picture does not require that any comparison between plant-based and animal products will always show the plant product or portion to be more climate-friendly. It is often the individual results of studies – which make for nice headlines – that are reported in the media. For example, results that are obtained in a particular setting and from a particular angle of analysis, and that show that certain vegetables are more harmful to the climate than certain meats, receive considerable media coverage. This is the case, for example, if the same amount of energy should be consumed by eating either green salad or beef.
Good scientific literacy will enable you to understand why such a research design is inherently peculiar, and why a single study of this kind will not sway the big picture one way or the other, because the overall understanding is built on a huge body of research findings. Individual studies can sometimes be "misses" for a variety of reasons. That is why, for example, knowing the environmental impact of various human systems requires the accumulation of results from which, taken as a whole, the most accurate estimate of the human impact can be inferred.
For instance, for the carbon footprint of food, meta-studies that bring together research findings are more relevant than a single study or calculation. In the case of food, we can use as an example a meta-study that combined 570 studies and thus aggregated data from more than 38,000 farms in 119 countries, with results that both reported the range and the arithmetic mean of the climate impacts of different foods across studies. Such a meta-study provides us with the overall picture of the data rather than confusing individual figures reported in the media. It is also noteworthy that the IPCC's big picture message provides clear guidance on the direction of change, independent of the variations of the more precise figures.
Above we illustrated the levels and forms of quantitative information with the example of GHG emissions from the food system. Qualitative scientific information, on the other hand, is a whole other form of information. It can describe the state of things in the world or, alternatively, it can also seek to increase understanding of why things are the way they are. Qualitative information can also help to understand which perspectives are useful for describing, diagnosing and solving sustainability challenges.
When dealing with sustainability issues, qualitative data that increases understanding is very important. For example, qualitative "why/how" questions help to understand what factors prevent people from making more sustainable consumption choices at the individual level and why it is so difficult to move away from fossil energy in societies. Further research helps to deepen and enrich such understanding and also challenges previous assumptions. Individual research often sheds further light on a limited aspect, as the scientific approach (as opposed to Friday evening pub debate) to exploring the causes of human behavior and the characteristics and mechanisms of human systems is slow and requires many working hours. Moreover, as part of an understanding of how human systems work, the limitations of scientific knowledge must also be borne in mind. This will be discussed further later in section 3.3, Making wise pathway choices.
Scientific literacy means a general understanding of how science works and what kind of knowledge it produces. The research information reported in scientific journals is often formulated according to the principles and criteria for reporting research within a certain discipline. As such, it is not intended to be understood by just anyone, and most researchers can only read a very limited range of scientific publications in sufficient detail to be able, for example, to deduce the strengths and weaknesses of a research design.
Therefore, scientific knowledge needs to be "translated", that is, adapted to the needs of communities. For example, many research reports are produced for this purpose. However, understanding their message also requires scientific literacy, so that the information presented is placed in the right place and at the right level on the map, and does not, for example, hide or obscure other relevant parts of the map. In understanding and addressing global environmental problems, the international climate and biodiversity panels, IPCC and IPBES, play an important role in synthesizing research findings and assessing alternative actions based on these findings: they aim to draw and update a globe-wide picture of climate change and biodiversity loss from different perspectives.
University of Illinois Feed Technology Center. (Photo: James Baltz, Unsplash.)
Sustainability competence and the GreenComp competence framework
Sustainability competence provides the capacity to “…take or request action that restores and maintains ecosystem health and enhances justice, generating visions for sustainable futures”. (GreenComp report, p. 12;) Essentially, sustainability competence also includes broad literacy skills, such as science literacy and future literacy. The content of sustainability competence is comprehensively outlined, for example, in the GreenComp (green competences) report.
GreenComp is an EU-founded competence framework built by a group of researchers and officials to promote sustainability education. It defines the concept of sustainability competence in 12 competences, i.e. sustainability skills. The framework supports sustainability education and training for all ages by clarifying what education and training should holistically include and promote. The ultimate goal of sustainability education is to produce systemic and critical thinkers who care about the state of the environment. Sustainability competence includes knowledge, skills and attitudes. Learning thus involves not only acquiring knowledge in the traditional sense but also increasing understanding of how to make a difference and increasing willingness to promote change. Such learning is transformative: it changes mindsets, beliefs and sometimes even values in a holistic way.
The competence framework also emphasizes an understanding of the many roles that individuals play at different stages of their lives and through which sustainability can be promoted in different ways; we will learn more about these in section 4, Change agents. It is essential to strengthen our understanding of how we act and influence continuously in different social networks and communities. Sustainability competence is therefore not just about changing our own behavior as individuals; it is also crucial to the systems changes required to achieve a sustainability transition.
GreenComp has been created on the basis of feedback and shared insights from dozens of sustainability education experts and stakeholders. However, it was not tested in practice before the report's publication in autumn 2022. The creators of GreenComp encourage the development of the competence framework based on application experience. For example, the EU-funded research project GreenSCENT, which started in 2022, tests, extends and develops GreenComp.
The GreenComp competence framework describes 12 sustainability competences. They relate to values that support sustainability, critical and systems thinking, envisioning sustainable futures and action.
If you have completed all the previous Planetary well-being MOOCs, you can see that the courses link to the different competences and sustainability skills described in the GreenComp framework. GreenComp emphasizes systems thinking skills that are important for building pathways to planetary well-being, but which have not been a strong part of environmental education so far.
Like the idea of planetary well-being, the values of the GreenComp competence framework is at least partly non-human-centered. The framework defines sustainability as giving priority to the needs of all life forms. Many of the sustainability skills and attitudes listed in the framework relate to considering non-human nature for its own sake, rather than simply as something that is necessary for human well-being. GreenComp lists among the sustainability skills a respect for other forms of life, while the sustainability attitudes include empathy for non-human life, a critical attitude towards views that elevate humans above other species, and a desire to foster a harmonious relationship betwe
However, GreenComp sets planetary boundaries (discussed earlier) as threshold values for sustainability, and their human-centeredness has been criticized. Planetary well-being sets stricter thresholds to safeguard the well-being of the rest of nature and thus requires more ambitious environmental action. One could say that GreenComp is broadly compatible with the non-human-centered values of planetary well-being, but drifts into human-centeredness in defining concrete limits to human activity. On the other hand, it is difficult to avoid this drift if the competence framework is to be anchored in concepts and discourses that are familiar to people, as those discourses are mostly human-centered. We, too, have chosen the theme of this course to be the sustainability transition, even though the sustainability transition, as currently understood in its mainstream definition, does not guarantee planetary well-being.
However, most of the pathways to the sustainability transition and the competences that promote it are, for the time being, also pathways towards planetary well-being, although they may not lead all the way to planetary well-being. However, the skills and capacities needed along the way are the same.
Something to think about: your own sustainability skills
What are the strengths and areas for improvement of your own sustainability competence? Use the GreenComp competence framework's structuring of 12 sustainability competences to help you reflect. For example, you could identify 2 to 5 skills that you consider to be your strongest. Where have you learned these skills? What skills, in turn, do you see as the most important areas for improvement in your case? Where could you develop them (e.g. through studies, work-based learning, further training or leisure time)?