The SCABEE project reached out to Wilfried Manhart from FHV Austria to share his perspectives on this important topic.
This insightful article, delves into the complexity of addressing environmental sustainability in business and education. MANHART highlights the limitations of traditional business methods, such as financial efficiency, in solving environmental challenges.
He advocates for a focus on resource efficiency and the need to educate future leaders through comprehensive case studies. By integrating these sustainable strategies, companies can create more meaningful value and contribute to long-term environmental solutions.
Understanding the Complexities of Sustainability and the Need for Systemic Change
Addressing environmental sustainability is truly a demanding task, as the parameters as well as their interrelationships and dynamics are causing a complexity, that humans typically cannot handle.
The challenge in education therefore is to sort out the major concepts that address the understanding of the components first and deal with the loose ends when you are knowledgeable about the different system components.
What is different in this matter is the available time we have to come up with best solutions. When humanity is faced with complex problems under time pressure, the search for the “one best solution” is the wrong approach. Successful handling of complexity entails broadening the understanding of the “system” step by step, then let those ambitious people work on solutions and select and distribute the best results to all participants as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, we in business have developed suboptimal methods to define the “best solution”. While financial efficiency (e.g. ROI) is problematic, because we cannot predict the future “cost” of our current behaviour, other concepts are rare. I suggest a resource efficiency measure, that relates the footprint of activities or production (materials, pollution, negative environmental impacts) to the positives, that can/should be achieved with it.
Such “Positives” would be improvements of the environment (renaturation, carbon capture and storage, etc.) or the avoidance of additional resource use (resource efficiency) by increasing the useful life of products and their use as well as keeping existing resources in a circular flow (e.g. waste management) to maximize the benefits from already existing resources. With this we could achieve higher wealth (= resource availability to more people) without more new resources being generated.
Definitely not part of the Positives would be adaptation activities (although necessary to protect existing resources), as they do not add to solutions, instead only improving the ability to bear the consequences of past and future impacts, yet they will significantly reduce our capacity to invest into the “Positives” in the future. Therefore avoidance and improvement strategies should always have priority to coping strategies in the early stages.
For this to happen, companies must change their way of creating and delivering value, at the same time using the principles of efficiency and effectiveness to do this in the most meaningful way.
Providing students with appropriate tools and methods to acquire these competences is the purpose of the case studies to be created and making them available to a broad audience.
A Path Forward: Embracing Resource Efficiency for a Sustainable Future
In summary, Wilfried Manhart’s insights from FHV Austria emphasize the critical need for businesses and educational institutions to rethink traditional approaches to sustainability. By prioritizing resource efficiency and equipping future leaders with the tools to address environmental challenges, the SCABEE project is paving the way for a more sustainable future.
