How can a systems thinking approach help us achieve a sustainable future?

Accelerating resource consumption, biodiversity loss and climate change are damaging the planet's ability to support life. In order to secure a sustainable future, we must adopt new ways of thinking and addressing complex problems. System thinking represents one of society's best bets for making real progress towards the sustainability transition by viewing all natural and human systems as interdependent. In this episode, Sophie Warren, Sustainability Manager at Foresight Group and Lola Bushnell, Sustainable Futures Strategist at Arup, discuss what is meant by system thinking, and how the Earth's natural and built systems can be designed in a way to co-exist and co-evolve to benefit society and the environment. Key Takeaways include: Understanding what systems thinking is and how can it help us to achieve a sustainable future Understanding how well systems thinking principles are currently integrated within industry Identifying what policies are driving systems thinking Understanding what is meant by regenerative design and the benefit of it Addressing the main barriers to achieving true regenerative design in infrastructure Lola is a Sustainable Futures Strategist at the global design and engineering firm, Arup. Lola sits in the Foresight team, Arup's internal think tank, and is focused on influencing the wider industry toward nature-led, regenerative design practices and systemic decarbonisation strategies that produce net positive outcomes for people and the planet. The podcast is for information purposes only and without limitation, does not constitute an offer, an invitation to offer or a recommendation to engage in any investment activity. Listeners should not construe the content of this podcast as investment advice and no reliance may be placed upon the content. The opinions of speakers are their personal opinions and not necessarily those of their respective companies. Foresight Group LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 198020). Foresight's registered office is at The Shard, 32 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9SG. {TRANSCRIPT} Sophie Warren [00:00:04] Welcome to Foresight's sustainability podcast, a series that explores sustainability themes that will play a crucial part in shaping our world in the current period of accelerated change. In this series, we will be sitting down with industry experts to explore some of the major developments in sustainability related fields, and consider the challenges facing businesses in a new decade of climate action. With these sessions, we aim to inform and promote dialogue around the mainstreaming of sustainability. I'm your host, Sophie Warren. I'm the Sustainability Portfolio Manager at Foresight in the Infrastructure Department. And today I'm joined by Lola Bushnell. Lola is a Sustainable Future Strategist, at Arup. Welcome Lola, would you like to begin by introducing yourself? Lola Bushnell [00:00:42] Hi Sophie, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, so I'm coming from Arup, which is a global design firm made up of a breadth of technical specialists working to solve some of the world's most challenging problems. And we range from ecologists to structural engineers to urban planners. And I sit within Foresight, which is essentially our internal think tank, which is focussed on supporting the long term transformation and adaptation of our firm, and that includes the future market opportunities, emerging risks, future skill requirements and the wider transformational needs of our firm. And we have framed the firm around being a sustainable development focussed company. So much of the work that we do is exploring how we can actually build a better world. Sophie Warren [00:01:33] Brilliant, thanks for the intro Lola. So today we're going to look at about systems thinking and how that relates to regenerative design, which the Foresight team at Arup look at. So we're going to go through a number of questions. Firstly, looking at systems thinking, and then heading into more of a regenerative design context. So first of all, I was wondering if you could give us a high level overview of what systems thinking is, and how systems thinking can help us to achieve sustainable future. Lola Bushnell [00:02:03] Yeah, so systems thinking is really about breaking down the silos in our thinking. So looking at the interdependencies within our systems, be those within nature or within the infrastructure and buildings in our cities, essentially to ensure that our design interventions are having the greatest outcome for multiple of beneficiaries and are not causing unintended harm. Sophie Warren [00:02:27] So it's looking at the interrelations of all systems in the global wider context. Lola Bushnell [00:02:34] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So one way to look at systems thinking is with the Planetary Boundaries framework, which is a framework developed by leading earth systems scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and it's essentially looking at nine key earth system processes that have tipping points within them, that if past cause runaway consequences. And these systems are related to each other. So that includes the climate system, so CO2, but also the biosphere, the natural capacity to respond to shocks in the system, but also our water systems. So, say if we're looking at our forests, which are sequestering carbon, but they're also releasing water vapour through evapotranspiration, driving our global water cycles, these systems are interdependent. So effectively we need to be looking at them simultaneously, not narrowly, just at carbon or just at water systems. Sophie Warren [00:03:31] Brilliant. And how do you think systems thinking principles is currently integrated into industry and solution-based businesses? Lola Bushnell [00:03:39] Yeah. So the challenge with systems thinking is identifying beneficiaries and specifically quantifying the value that they're getting from a particular intervention. So say with a nature based solution, carbon may be one outcome. You may have someone paying for carbon storage, but if you're planting trees, you're also providing some water regulating services. So say you're mitigating flood risk through the catchment. So identifying who's actually benefiting from that flood risk mitigation can be quite challenging and complex. So for those reasons, we haven't gotten very good at paying for kind of the multiple benefits, or understanding what the best intervention is for the greatest number of beneficiaries. Sophie Warren [00:04:28] And in terms of applying systems thinking principles, it's still quite early stage then I guess. Lola Bushnell [00:04:34] Yes, definitely. Although novel technologies like remote sensing and AI are in the early stages of being able to help us actually model and understand these interactions. Sophie Warren [00:04:46] Yeah, pushing out that knowledge step forward as well, with massive data driven solutions. So the Foresight team at Arup look at integrating systems thinking into the built environment through regenerative design. Can you first start off with telling me what regenerative design is? Lola Bushnell [00:05:03] Yeah. So before that, I think it's helpful to get a bit of a framing of where humans are within our wider earth system. So if you were to put earth's history on a calendar year, first life comes around in March, dinosaurs come around in December and disappeared by Christmas, and humanoids first came around on the 21st of December. And in the last 2 seconds we have become a geophysical force emitting half a trillion tonnes of CO2. And in the last third of a second, around 70% of animal biomass has been extinguished. And then what that means is effectively in the next tenth of a second, what we do will dictate the future of humanity. So that's all to say, we as humans are part of nature, yet we've become very unusual. We've become this really significant geophysical force. And the question then becomes, how can we better participate in this living system that we depend on and that we are a part of? So regenerative design takes a holistic approach in which the built in natural systems are designed to co-exist and co-evolve over time. And that means that they're delivering net positive environmental and social outcomes and ensuring both human and planetary health. Sophie Warren [00:06:23] Brilliant. And what are the key principles of regenerative design that you apply at the Foresight Group? Lola Bushnell [00:06:30] Yeah, so at Foresight, we've kind of simplified things down into these three key elements. The first is nature led design for planetary health, which is about participating and co-evolving as part of nature. And that really is resting on the fact that life has had 3.8 billion years of research and development. And we can look to those solutions to solve some of our challenges. The second is circularity for and with nature, and that's really around ensuring that our human made systems are actually mimicking the circularity that we see in nature. And third is nurturing a just space for humanity, which really focuses on shifting away from narrow economic growth, framing toward planetary health and maximising well-being through progressive targets and environmental justice, and really enabling design that's deeply rooted in the local context for local communities. Sophie Warren [00:07:33] I guess the just transition isn't something that has been well executed thus far in any sort of sustainability solutions. Lola Bushnell [00:07:41] Yeah, that's definitely been a challenge. And something to really emphasise here with regenerative design is that it's not new. We've been doing this for generations. Traditional cultures and indigenous peoples have been living in harmony with nature's cycles for many, many years and we need to listen to how local land is being managed, and learn from and work with people who are the real custodians of their land. Sophie Warren [00:08:12] So it's learning from traditional ways of doing things. Lola Bushnell [00:08:16] Absolutely. Sophie Warren [00:08:17] And what are the main benefits of integrating regenerative design in infrastructure? Lola Bushnell [00:08:22] Yeah, it really comes down to resilience. So effectively, product design, buildings, manufacturing processes, agriculture, all of human activity will function best and be more in harmony with ecological processes when nature is used as the model and guide. So we can kind of think of this as an ecosystems based approach. And that's really not to recreate the pre-development ecosystem, but it's instead to understand how all of our infrastructure, buildings and spaces can actually perform the functions and processes that those earlier ecosystems provided. And again, we can look to an ecosystem to say, like just as each organism within an ecosystem has a role to play in its wider functioning and health, each component within the built system should give to and receive from its neighbours and actually participate in nature cycles from the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the nutrient cycle, in a reinforcing rather than damaging way. And in that way we're well integrated. We can withstand and absorb the shocks and the variability that we do sometimes see in nature and continue to close resource loops so that we can continue to flourish and thrive. Sophie Warren [00:09:47] And the resilience piece is going to be more and more important going forward in the fight for net zero by 2050 and designing for the future as well, and becoming a major player in the strength of the economy going forward, right? Lola Bushnell [00:10:01] Absolutely. Yeah. And that's where we need to really re-learn what nature already provides us in terms of resilient services. What a forested, healthy catchment does to store and purifiy our water and reduce flood risk, how healthy mangroves provide habitat for the fisheries that we depend on and protect against storm surge. So it's really about deeply understanding how we're already depending on these natural systems, but also how we can restore them and how we can enhance them through our infrastructure. Sophie Warren [00:10:39] Brilliant. And then in terms of Arup doing this work with stakeholders, how does Foresight team influence the infrastructure industry to proceed with innovative regenerative design approach? Lola Bushnell [00:10:52] Yeah, so the role of Foresight is really to explore what's on the cutting edge of our industry. And Arup is a sustainable development focussed firm. So really most of what we're doing is in that space. And much of this is just really about reimagining how we can do things. We get very stuck in the status quo and it's about giving the space to explore what a built system could be, what humans evolving with nature could look like. So a lot of this is just creating frameworks, but also really reconnecting with nature and reconnecting with what it can provide us. Local plants and animals and ecologies have evolved to thrive in specific climatic conditions and resource constraints. And we can learn from their unique adaptations and we can design built systems that are well integrated with the natural environment. But that requires kind of reframing the way we set our objectives in terms of what is success. Sophie Warren [00:11:58] And there's a form of sort of selling the long term benefits of such design integration. So whether upfront sort of regenerative design is taken on board in infrastructure or whether later down the line, a certain amount of retrofitting would have to happen for a building, in order to integrate technologies that policies are driving as well. So is that something that you look at as well, the economics benefits of regenerative design at an early stage? Lola Bushnell [00:12:25] Yeah, absolutely. Our project teams who are implementing this work on the ground are absolutely doing these kind of more complex and quantitative assessments of the long term benefits. Much of what we do as the Foresight team is really to tell the story of that future and to demonstrate the wider benefits, and the continued business resilience for our clients. So say if we're looking at how the task force on nature related financial disclosures might affect a client's long term ability to actually perform their business operations. And kind of how things are shifting within the industry and how a regenerative approach will actually support their long term viability. Sophie Warren [00:13:13] Yeah, and a lot of the time there is a major focus on carbon reduction through infrastructure design, and many other impacts of infrastructure such as those on the biosphere are missed. Can you tell me how many other factors are considered in the regenerative design process? Lola Bushnell [00:13:29] Yeah, absolutely. So we're looking really at scale, at system scale. So looking at the water cycle. So where is water being stored in healthy soils, and in the biomass of plants in a catchment, but also looking at nutrient loops. So as we're accumulating nutrients through our food systems and so on, how can we bring those nutrients back to the catchment, back to our farmlands. And of course carbon cycles. But really looking at all of these earth system processes and how they relate to each other as well. Sophie Warren [00:14:06] So it seems to be that the regenerative design approach is actually a bit more forward thinking than what policy is dictating at the moment in terms of design. And getting ahead of the curve. Lola Bushnell [00:14:17] Yeah, absolutely. And a key distinction between regenerative design and sustainability is sustainability is really focussed on harm reduction, while regenerative design is looking at how can we actually repair the damage that's been done, how can we reconnect cycles that we've disrupted and actually participate in nature's cycles rather than seeing ourselves as outside of them? Sophie Warren [00:14:45] Can you give us an example of how you reconnect natural cycles? Lola Bushnell [00:14:49] Yeah. So there's this great example in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that is using bioremediation to treat their wastewater, and it's a great example of designing for and with nature. So it's designing for nature because this is a very arid climate. And the urban system had been diverting these waterways and sending out polluted water that was degrading the natural wetland downstream. And rather than investing in this really costly thermal wastewater treatment plant, the city is doing so naturally by using biomimicry, basically introducing natural species that attenuate the nutrients in the wastewater. So that's things like plants, and fish, and microbes that break down waste. And they also have these natural oxygenation weirs that are mimicking a rocky stream and actually oxygenating the water and breaking down coliform. And this natural bioremediation facility then feeds directly into the wetland area, restoring the wetland and cooling the area as well, providing a really comfortable place for people to hang out and walk around. It's this great public benefit. So reconnecting this water cycle by leveraging the species that are evolved to carry out the task that humans are looking to engineer. Sophie Warren [00:16:25] There's a massive benefit from different sort of area types and different stakeholders as well. That's really useful case study. Thanks, Lola. And the likes of the nutrient loops that you mentioned and the biosphere sort of designs can be then analysed against the planetary boundaries that you discussed earlier as well. Lola Bushnell [00:16:43] Yeah, absolutely. Setting science based targets is super key here. So targets can be set and regulated against. We can say we need to have X percent of stormwater actually stored through green infrastructure within our urban systems, so that we're replenishing the aquifer, the groundwater, but also mitigating flood risk and you can actually create markets within that. So there's this great case in Washington D.C. that off the back of the Clean Water Act, Washington D.C., was told by the Environmental Protection Agency that they had to mitigate their surface water flooding. And the city responded by going directly to property developers and mandating that they manage their stormwater onsite. What they could not manage would actually be, they could buy credits for that stormwater management, which basically opened up a market for developers to create green infrastructure for water storage rather than redoing their entire sewage system. Now they have all this green infrastructure. What made that work is the city guaranteed a price floor for those credits so that if they weren't bought in the market, the city would buy them. And that becomes a really good way for the city to spend its money rather than investing directly in creating an entirely new sewage system. Sophie Warren [00:18:17] That's really interesting, actually. I've not heard of a water credit market in any nation or region, so that's a very interesting case. In terms of regenerative design, obviously is focussed towards a certain geography looking at just transition in a certain context for example. How can these regenerative design solutions be scaled up? And is there any examples you can give us of that as well? Lola Bushnell [00:18:42] Yeah. So again, moving toward technology here is really key. We can look back to traditional civilisations and they're working more closely with nature's cycles. But the reality is our urban agglomerations today have enormous resource flows moving through them and we're not going to be working super closely with the cycles of nature at every application. So super key here is having a very well quantified and well modelled view of the resource flows moving through the city. So urban metabolism is a really great framing for that which actually sees a city like an animal's metabolism process, and is all about seeing how our systems interact and we can actually digitise that. So the Centre for Digital Built Britain is creating this tool called the Connected Digital Twin, which is basically creating the infrastructure to share digital representations of physical assets. And what that means is once you have that systems view, you can actually see how shocks ripple through an infrastructure system. And that allows for designers to identify areas for resilience interventions that have the greatest effect for the system, but it also allows for resource sharing. So if there's excess heat in part of the system that can then be used to heat a building, say, but it's really just looking at these interdependencies and seeing how we can maximise systemic efficiency but also reconnect with nature cycles. So understanding our reliance on nature resources first and then modelling to identify interventions that are beneficial for the wider system, that's really how we can get these things to scale. Sophie Warren [00:20:47] And in terms of implementation of true regenerative design at scale, what are the main barriers to achieving that? Lola Bushnell [00:20:56] Yeah, so this really comes back again to this beneficiaries question, of being able to say, okay, so these are the carbon benefits of this landscape restoration, these are the flood risk mitigation benefits, this is the social value. Right now, we don't really have off-the-shelf financial products for institutional investors to go for the wider benefits. So we end up going for this very narrow gains. Say if we're investing in carbon, we may end up investing in something that isn't so good for the wider system health. You may have a tree that's non-native and isn't supporting the wider ecosystem. So it's really this, how do we look at wider system health in our investments and how can we kind of reframe the problem? Sophie Warren [00:21:50] And I think there's been a couple of articles out recently about skills gap in this area. Is there anything that you've seen that we could do with upskilling, sort of wider sustainability professionals or engineering professionals on bridging that gap and understanding how do we actually achieve regenerative design through a specific sort of skill set? Lola Bushnell [00:22:09] Yeah, I mean, at a high level, it's really in nature's literacy. There's so much to learn from our local species that have evolved in these resource constraints that we're existing within. This whole field of biomimicry. It would be so great to see that more integrated into the design world, but also into our economic thinking. And then to get a bit more technical within that, in terms of our areas of quantification and target setting. Soil is slowly starting to pick up steam, but that's really where things come down to, when we're talking about carbon, when we're talking about water storage. So much of that is really about soil health. And across the industries that are working in this space, literacy is still quite low. So that's an area that we're really hoping to see gain some momentum, which it is starting to which is really promising. Sophie Warren [00:23:07] Brilliant. Are there any particular projects that your team and you've worked on that you could share some interesting details and some sort of successful outcomes of? Lola Bushnell [00:23:16] Yeah. So one that's really looking at the scale of the city and reconnecting flows where we disrupt them is this tool that Arup has developed called the Sponge City Snapshot, which essentially takes, uses satellite imagery and machine learning and AI to classify land types within urban areas and kind of set a baseline of where cities already are in terms of the absorbency of their green spaces. And then it also gives recommendations on how existing open spaces and underutilised green spaces can actually be improved to maximise water retention. So that's a case of, you know, just increasing the knowledge of where we are today so that we can understand what we need to do to get where we know we need to be with these science based targets. Sophie Warren [00:24:12] Has that been adopted, any sort of solutions from that been adopted, do you know, from any particular cities or? Lola Bushnell [00:24:19] Yes. So it was first rolled out in Shanghai and is also now in Seoul, and Auckland, and Nairobi, and a number of other cities. And our water teams are working with those municipalities to actually implement this green infrastructure on the ground. So working first, quite at a high level on an urban strategy, but then actually going on to implement this green infrastructure with these localised projects. Sophie Warren [00:24:51] So as we say about scaling up, that is definitely one sort of solution that is sounds like it is being scaled up at a global level. Lola Bushnell [00:24:58] Absolutely. Absolutely. Sophie Warren [00:25:01] Okay. So what are the main challenges in investing in nature? Lola Bushnell [00:25:04] Yeah. So this comes back to the variability and permanence of nature. We have a pretty low tolerance in our financial sector for this uncertainty and variability. So say if we're investing in carbon capture and storage, there is still this really strong preference toward more engineered industrial scale things like direct air capture and carbon storage in geological forms over, say, restoring peatland or reforestation. And that comes down to, you know, the uncertainty and the long term permanence of that healthy ecosystem. If there's a drought or if there's disease and that carbon is lost. We see a similar thing in resilience. We tend to go for the really easily quantifiable benefits of great infrastructure for stormwater management. Say, you know, canalysing rivers or having a storm surge barrier. We have a tendency to invest in that over, say, restoring a catchment to reduce flood risk upstream. And a lot of that has to do with this variability. It can be quite challenging to model these things at scale in nature. But also the uncertainty, you know, if that ecosystem does decline. But so much of that has to do with the fact that we're investing very narrowly just in this carbon storage or just in this resilience, sometimes stacking a couple of benefits, but typically not more than two. And also this low tolerance for variability and complexity. So there's a bit of a reframe that's needed in what is our tolerance for risk and how can we actually design that into our approaches? And again, how can we design in these multiple beneficiaries? Sophie Warren [00:26:55] Yeah, definitely. It's something that there's going to be a lot of work on going forward in the next couple of years, obviously driven by sometimes policies that are coming in, such as the Environmental Act, which has multiple targets in different areas, which I think is going to require the likes of regenerative design to achieve. That was a really interesting conversation. I've certainly learned a lot. Thanks, Lola, for sharing your ideas and your thoughts on systems thinking and regenerative design and what Arup do and the Foresight team. So thank you very much. Lola Bushnell [00:27:25] Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. It was great to have a conversation with you. Sophie Warren [00:27:29] Thanks. Bye.