Project Drawdown reposted this
Business ecologist 🌱 • Facilitating sustainable change for a brighter and better future.
I will never get tired of saying this: You don't need to have "sustainability" in your job title in order to drive change through your work. 🌍 Are you in HR? Help rethink how your organization runs employee benefits or recruitment, or reshape your workplace culture to a more sustainable one. Are you in PR or marketing? By engaging customers, rethinking production, creating climate-focused campaigns, and helping support climate policy advocacy you can help ensure the business is promoting climate solutions. Are you a product designer? Then maybe you can incorporate climate solutions into the design process – from sustainable prototyping and low-carbon materials to incorporating actionable climate information for consumers. Even people in sales or other client-facing positions (I'm looking at you, consultants!) can make a difference 👇 Are you sitting there and thinking: "Yeah that's all good, but there's nothing I can do at my job" ? Leave a comment and I'll prove you wrong 😉 #sustainability #foodforthought #climateaction [source: Project Drawdown]
I agree. Sustainability has been “othered” as something outside the mainstream. This is not a surprise as sustainability requires three core superpowers than many chose not use or develop: Thinking long term; Thinking globally; and Thinking across difference. Until we evolve as a species to do this, we will exist in a quarterly profit driven mindset. Having said that, I see lots of progress and reasons for optimism in some of the governments recent actions to incentivize the fee market to pursue sustainability. I also reasons for doubt. Some of the most powerful environmental initiatives ever, on the planet, were initiated by the Republican Party. The EPA, for example was signed by Nixon. I fear that the current iteration of the GOP is focused on hyper local and hyper short term thinking. This election matters!
Great point, Natalia! Sustainability is definitely a team effort. We can all contribute in our roles at work, and of course, in our personal lives too. Alba mentioned diversity, which is crucial. It brings a wider range of perspectives to the table. But diversity goes beyond gender and nationality -although those are hugely important, of course. To truly embrace diversity, I think we should also consider personality types and experience levels. Strong teams find sustainable solutions faster when they have a good mix of introverts and extroverts, as well as senior and junior members. This blend of viewpoints helps us find more powerful solutions!
Bob Leonard
1w
Climate touches everything. No matter an individual's interests, skills, education, career, experience, talents... there are many actions they can take to make valuable contributions. You can download a free copy of Now That You Know (which contains hundreds of suggestions) here: https://thisspaceshipearth.org/
Woah, haven't seen you on my feed for AGES!
And this helps us see how every individual can contribute towards this effort. Individual-contributions are not too small / insignificant … ignoring (or worse, degrading) individual-contributions isn’t cool. Thanks for sharing, Natalia.
You forgot to mention probably the most underrated of all climate jobs: Procurement
Positive Planet offers some really cool role-specific Net Zero educational courses to get you started / continue your journey of alleviating sustainability efforts within the organization. :)
Jerry Flach
1w
The planet is crying out for attention and acting on the solutions at hand, being part of the change, is a response to what some have called healthy anxiety that is the urgency to #actonclimate vs. the morass of ignoring the greatest need of our time.
Farhan Munir
1w
Thought provoking and absolute reality , unlearning the old ways and understanding interconnectness of relationship makes it more relevant in today's time. Excellent read Natalia E.L. Madsen, PhD 🙏
Leadership | Sustainable R&D | Thinking outside the box
1wI think it goes down to the understanding of 'sustainability'. How many times have we heard/read sentences like e.g. 'what does diversity have to do with sustainability'? Unfortunately, it's fundamental misunderstandings that leads to believing "there's nothing I can do at my job".