The postgraduate area of the Faculty of Engineering organized a webinar on sustainability to discuss The problems and challenges surrounding development today. Two specialists invited us to rethink how we conceive of the world and proposed new ways of understanding sustainable development.
The webinar was opened by Ing. Environmental Law Ivan Eglis, Director of the Environment Department of the Faculty of Engineering, whoever shareion a historical overview de environmental management to understand how We have reached the current situation where it is necessary to propose new development paradigms.
We are currently exceeding planetary limits: humanity is beyond the Earth's capacity to sustain life. The following graphic shows the zone in which each of the planetary boundaries is located:
This context allows us to understand that the current form of development is not compatible with the Earth's capacity to maintain, in the medium and long term, the living conditions we know.Furthermore, sustainable development strategies are not proving sufficient. Given these conditions, What can be done from now on?
To answers to this question, Gonzalo del Castillo, executive director of Club of Rome Argentina and the Sustainability Center for Local Governments (CeSus) shared new development models that do not threaten life. Among these, He introduced us to the world of regenerative development, which presents a an ethical perspective that puts the care of life at the center. Gonzalo emphasized that we are at a unique moment in the history of humanity in terms of knowledge: we are a society founded on technical rationality, science has never been as evolved as it is today. Despite this, what the Club of Rome warned of as a possibility in its report "The Limits to Growth" (1972) has now become a reality: we are on the verge of planetary boundaries. If current civilizational models are not modifiednn drastically, we run the certain and imminent risk of descending into a process of systemic collapse in which both the human population and its levels of well-being and consumption will no longer be able to sustain themselves.
Gonzalo shared an excerpt from the report The Limits to Growth (1972), by the Club of Rome:
“The set of possible futures encompasses a wide variety of trajectories; there could be a sudden collapse, or a smooth transition to sustainability, but none of the possible futures include indefinite growth in physical production flows under any scenario. This option is not possible on a finite planet. The only realistic options involve reducing the production flows that sustain human activities to sustainable levels through a conscious decision, technology and human organizations, or in letting nature force the decision through food, energy or material shortages, or through increasing environmental deterioration.”
The alternative model, which was already being discussed in the 70s, has not yet been implemented… why? Gonzalo pointed out that it's due to the short film the complacency that society has, supported by an exacerbated model of production and consumption of resources. Over the past 50 years, there has been an unprecedented increase in resource availability, and consequently, in human well-being. This has led to a development model focused almost exclusively on economic and technological aspects, but which has ignored and rendered invisible the associated environmental costs and impacts, now undeniable.
In this context, regenerative development argues that the model of the last 50 years has been degenerative. with all environmental indicators reflecting tremendously negative results. The change must be drastic: The conventional model with the logic of mitigating impacts and consuming moderately is no longer sufficient; a further step is needed: human beings must be understood as an integral part of nature in order to be co-participants in the process of diversifying life. This is the most disruptive aspect of regenerative development.
According to the expert, the Sustainable Development Goals set in 2015 are now insufficient in terms of sustainability. Progress on the goals has not been even; those related to protecting the planet have not improved. Gonzalo proposed a new way of organizing the objectives, placing at the base those that are most important, as they are a condition of possibility for the other objectives: climate action, biodiversity conservation, or marine life. The current model has forgotten that the basis for all development is nature.
A new way of framing the Sustainable Development Goals:
Scientific knowledge is already on everyone's lips: we are in the midst of a scenario of multiple crises in environmental terms. The most problematic aspect is that it is a conceptual problem, defined by the specialist as a "cosmological problem". Modern human beingsBased on its instrumental capacity, it has posited as one of its main cosmological principles, that of being something unlike nature. To Doing so reduced to nature as a source of matter and energy, ignoring that human beings themselves are an inseparable part of it: "it is a factual fact that we are one with nature," argued del Castillo.
Regenerative development seeks to enable human societies to collaborate in Nature's own life-regeneration process. To achieve this, del Castillo proposes revisiting biomimetic thinking to design any project or public policy based on nature's principles. Some of the proposed principles relate to 1) Use what is locally available (breaks with globalization), 2) do not generate waste and recycle everything, 3) everything is symbiotically connected, 4) reward cooperation over competition, 5) Promote diversity.
The specialist shared several success stories of initiatives aligned with regenerative development. To learn more about these projects and rethink how development is currently being carried out, we invite you to listen to the full webinar at the following link. link.
About Gonzalo del Castillo
Gonzalo del Castillo holds a degree in Political Science. He is the Executive Director of the Club of Rome Argentina and the Center for Sustainability for Local Governments (CeSus). He is an Associate Member of the Club of Rome International and a member of La Ciudad Posible (a certified B Corporation). He is the Co-Director of the Circular Economy Laboratory at the National University of Rafaela (UNRaf) and of the Diploma Program in Ecosystem Development and Circular Economy (UCAECE and UNRaf). He consults for public and private, national and international organizations and is a regular contributor to the newspaper La Nación.
