Cohort 4 Fellows and Staff

The 20 Fellows in Cohort 4 hailed from Thailand, India, Pakistan, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, and the USA, representing the civil society, media, government, philanthropy, and business sectors. By design, 75% of the group is women. To read more about the Fellows, click here for their bios.

The Fellowship is deeply rooted in the life work of Donella Meadows. It emphasizes the tools of reflective conversation, vision, and systems thinking that inspired and characterized Donella’s work. Fellows also build capacity to engage across their different perspectives and experiences to deepen their understanding of complex systems. The sessions are designed to maximize opportunities for Fellows to learn from and engage with each other in ways that create the conditions for innovative insights and responses to global challenges. The opportunities and challenges of our response to climate change was an important learning ground for this class of Fellows.

The yearlong Fellowship consisted of a series of four workshops that took place at Cobb Hill, an eco-village on 270 acres of land in rural Vermont that is co-located with the Institute. Fellows were housed by community members and enjoyed ethically sourced, organic meals, including products from Cedar Mountain Farm, also co-located with the Institute.

Download the full report here.
See more Fellows video and written testimonials here.

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND (April 2010) The second World Resources Forum, to be held in Davos, Switzerland, September 18-21, 2011, will be organized by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (EMPA), in cooperation with Dana Meadows’ Sustainability Institute. Other partners in this prestigious global gathering include the Swiss and German governments.

The World Resources Forum (WRF) is an independent, international platform for debate on global resource consumption issues, advocating innovation for resource productivity. The WRF is building a bridge from the natural sciences and engineering to economics. It aims to equip political decision makers with the information needed to identify realistic policy options for sustainable growth.

The first forum was organized in 2009, with support from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and had speakers such as Dennis Meadows, Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker and Ashok Khosla. Over 350 scientists, entrepreneurs and policy makers shared their ideas and thoughts, which resulted in a common declaration.

The WRF aims to transcend the current political focus on climate change and to bring the broader issues of global resource consumption and resource productivity back onto the agenda. It has assembled an interdisciplinary network of scientists, engineers and economists who recognize the necessity of establishing economic principles that respect the physical properties of resources and the laws of nature. The forum aims at a consensus on the next practical steps to be taken towards a sustainable economy.

In the next few months the advisory board of the WRF will work on further refinements of the declaration, and elaborate on concrete policy recommendations, indicators and targets for the sustainable use of resources, with a “systems thinking lens”.

More information at the following link: http://www.worldresourcesforum.org/

As part of the Foresight India symposium taking place March 25-26 in New Delhi, Sustainability Institute’s executive director Bas de Leeuw will be presenting his text on applying a systems approach to resource scarcity.

In this text, De Leeuw begins by pointing out that through the years an increasing amount of credibility has been given to the issue of resource scarcity. Such scarcity is not only due to quantitative limitations, but also to the constraint location may put on their availability, due to conflicts and security concerns. Though society is far along this growth path, de Leeuw assures us there is still hope. If we put effort into looking at the whole picture, gathering more specific data on the global situation, and demonstrating the consequences of inaction, we can better understand the change we need. This change must be reflected on a global, national, and individual level in order to produce effective, innovative solutions and the legislation to support.

The full text of the article is here, and a pdf of the full reader is available here.

Cobb Hill Cohousing, Hartland, Vermont

The fourth Cohort of Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows completed their final weeklong workshop together in February, embarking into the world with enhanced leadership skills and a dynamic, supportive network. The 20 Fellows hailed from Thailand, India, Pakistan, Switzerland, Brazil, Canada, and the USA, representing the civil society, media, government, philanthropy, and business sectors. By design, 75% of the group is women.

The culmination of a yearlong series of four workshops, the gathering took place at Cobb Hill, the eco-village in rural Vermont co-located with the Institute. Fellows were housed by community members and enjoyed ethically sourced, organic meals, including products from Cedar Mountain Farm, also co-located with the Institute. Experiencing the land at different times of the year was a deliberate aspect of the program’s design. Fellows, for example, witnessed natural cycles directly by engaging in wood stacking efforts in the summer and fall, and reaping the warm benefits in the winter.

The Fellows Program provides a suite of tools that help social change leaders be more effective, insightful, and resilient. The systems thinking training helps Fellows analyze problems in a comprehensive way, while reflective conversation and other interpersonal skills helps them be more effective.

- Jen Mayer, San Francisco, California, Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Innovative Program Delivery

Fellows Huma Beg (Pakistan), Rachel Bagby (USA), Lorie Loeb (USA), and Newey Kraiwatnutsorn (Thailand)

Workshop participants deepened their systems thinking skills by examining some of the archetypes described in Donella Meadows’ book Thinking in Systems: Success to the Successful, Limits to Growth, Shifting the Burden to the Intervener, and Escalation.

Some of these archetypes appeared during short talks given by Institute staff and Fellows who had participated in the Copenhagen climate change negotiations. Dr. Beth Sawin shared about the Institute’s successes at Copenhagen. A Fellow talked about his facilitation role in the UNICEF and Dutch government-organized Children’s Climate Forum. Another Fellow analyzed the physical layout of the Bella Center, where the negotiations were held, noticing who had access to various venues, who had platforms to make their voices heard, and who was (or was not) listening. Others talked about the involvement of indigenous people in the event and about the civil society movement leading up to the conference.

An animated discussion on privilege emphasized that entrenched privilege in systems usually resists change. The group agreed that systems starved of information cannot respond to reality and that an attitude of learning will serve those seeking to engage with and change patterns in established systems.

Evelyn Arce (USA)

A program like I’ve never attended before. Thoroughly helps you unlearn and then facilitates you in picking up the pieces to help you ‘awake’ as a responsible person. It helps you sense and appreciate different cultures, see through various perspectives, and instills in you the skill sets to follow your vision.

- Amba Jamir, Guwahati, Assam, India, The Missing Link

The final coaching group meetings provided Fellows opportunities to celebrate successes together, and listen and ask questions about the challenges brought forward by their peers. At the end of the workshop, Fellows were paired to engage in peer coaching for the coming months.

Coaching helped me develop a vision, aspiration for the future, understand my role as CEO of a start-up and sustainability leader, tap into my strengths, and learn from others. In many ways it was in coaching that the learnings of the Fellowship were put into practice or modeled.

- Lorie Loeb, Hartland, Vermont, TellEmotion, Inc. and Dartmouth College

Participants also opened visioning letters that they had written to themselves the previous year and, after a guided visioning exercise, wrote forward-looking letters that the Institute will send to them in early 2011. These letters surely include the collaborations that many Fellows presented and are carrying out with one another, partnering across national boundaries on a diversity of projects, from performance art to publication, and corporate sustainability indicators to social networking.

Finally, a deeply moving component of the workshop was using creative expression to further action on climate change and sustainability challenges. In a 3-hour tour of force, Fellows performed on musical instruments, presented impactful images and videos, read poems, and shared collage, clay, and painted works of art.

Andrea Athanas (Switzerland)

I’m amazed at the wholeness that I am coming away with… I had anticipated the intellectual expansion with systems thinking, but not the aspect of tapping into creative expression and bringing my entire self into my work…

- Andrea Athanas, Gland, Switzerland, International Union for Conservation of Nature

Moving and inspiring, these expressions led into an innovative lights and spoken word performance and the collaborative creation of a sculpture made of various pieces of nature brought from Fellows’ own communities.

That evening, Fellows and staff celebrated the ending of their Fellowship and the beginning of new opportunities with food, humorous slide shows, games, music, and dancing. Fellows offered their heart-felt gratitude for the experience to their hosts at Cobb Hill and to their Institute stewards, facilitators, and coaches: Nancy Gabriel, Edie Farwell, Beth Sawin, Kaylynn Sullivan Two Trees, Mike Dupee, Jay Mead, and Phil Rice.

Alex Bauermeister (USA), Lorie Loeb, Rachel Bagby, Sudha Soni (India), Jed Davis (USA)

The Fellowship has shown me the value of diving into the learning loop with others. None of us have seen the far side of the sustainability revolution, so we – in diverse teams and partnerships – have to learn our way through it. When I recognize learning and relationship as central, I feel ready for anything.

- Dominic Stucker, Vancouver, Canada, Sustainability Institute

More written and video testimonials from Fellows.

BERLIN, GERMANY (March 2010) How to understand complex systems and how these have an impact on our life, how to recognize when we reach the limits of our intellectual thinking, how to go beyond these limits and use that for contributing to a more sustainable world – these are the messages of Dana Meadows’ latest book: “Die Grenzen des Denken” (the German translation of Thinking in Systems).  The analyses of Donella H. Meadows and her co-authors of “Limits to Growth” (1972) are still relevant for the problems of our world. Systems thinking, which was the basis of that report, is increasingly recognized as an important strategy to bring about sustainable consumption and production patterns. Systems behave similarly, root causes of current crises are complex and interlinked. In order to bring about effective strategies for change, system behavior needs to be understood. That is what this new book offers in practical, accessible language using eye-opening examples and humor.

Donella H. Meadows
Die Grenzen des Denkens
Wie wir sie mit System erkennen und überwinden können
Titel der Originalausgabe: Thinking in Systems (Chelsea Green Publishing 2008)
Translated by Karen und Hartmut Bossel,
in cooperation with Stephanie Weis-Gerhardt
oekom verlag, München
March 2010, 238 pages, 19,90 EUR
ISBN-13: 978-3-86581-199-8

(February 4, 2010) With January 31st as the ’soft’ deadline for countries to submit to the UNFCCC their proposals for greenhouse gas emissions reductions under the Copenhagen Accord we’ve been hearing the question from colleagues and the press: do these submissions bring the world any closer to the goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5° or 2°C?

We’ve ‘run the numbers’ and our most recent analysis shows essentially the same results that we reported December 19th at the close of the Copenhagen Summit: if current proposals were fully implemented average global temperature would overshot the 2° goal and would in fact increase by approximately 3.9°C (7.0°F) by 2100. Our press release contains more details on the analysis.

The Climate Scoreboard shown here, which reports the collective impact of current proposals on future temperatures, hasn’t begun the downward movement so many people around the world want to see.

The January 31 deadline marks the first milestone on the road to COP-16 in Mexico.We continue to believe that one of the best ways to make 2010 the year of the fair, binding, science-based global climate treaty is to make sure that voters, legislators, negotiators and heads of state all remain vividly aware of the gap between current proposals and the emissions reductions that the science tells us are needed.

Download the Scoreboard widget here to help keep the gap in the public view so that it can be seen, understood, and addressed.

WORCHESTER, MA, USA (February 4, 2010) An interactive exhibit that illustrates how climate change is impacting the earth opened at the Ecotarium in Worcester, Massachusetts. Based on the latest science, this traveling display uses a climate simulator developed by the Sustainability Institute in collaboration with MIT and Ventana Systems. Called C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator), the software that drives the exhibit will allow museum visitors to explore alternative approaches to mitigating climate change, while receiving immediate feedback on each approach.

The tour schedule for 2010 and beyond includes the Boston Museum of Science, the Vermont Institute of Natural Science (Quechee, VT), Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History (New Haven, CT), the Mount Washington Observatory (North Conway, NH) and the Beardsley Zoo (Bridgeport, CT).

Mike Richards, one of the founders of Climate Interactive, says their mission is: “to move climate simulation from a specialized craft that only deep scientists could deal with, to something speedy and easy to use” that could accurately inform non-scientists. Such information will give members of the public access to information they need to learn about climate change and to make informed choices about their life styles and political representation.

Exploring the exhibit teaches the visitors about the changes they will experience as Southern climates move North, such as new invasive plants and pests, more intense winds, coastal flooding and more extreme hot summer days. Visitors can investigate effects of increased carbon dioxide on native plant species, warmer winters on the maple sugar industry, more acidic oceans on the lobster fishery industry and extreme weather conditions on the city of Boston. The exhibition also includes a global climate change simulator.

Map of the Future from Tactable on Vimeo.

The exhibit grew out of a partnership with Richard Polonsky of Brown University and Henry Kaufman and team of the design firm Tactable. It is installed in the Ecotarium in Worcester, Massachusetts and will be on display until mid June, when it will move to the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium in Concord, NH for the summer.

For more information on C-ROADS and how to use it in interactive exhibitions, contact: apjones@sustainer.org or info@sustainer.org.

Developing a sustainability strategy for the Papua province is, as the workshop confirmed, inspired by the need to be prepared for eventual future environmental crises. Solutions need to be based on local cultural values. Key elements of such a plan may include:

1. Economic policies that focus on delivering a good quality of life, and sustainable, low-carbon economy.
2. Sustainable management of Papua’s own resources, amongst others through:
   1. Technological and economic innovations that reduce dependency on imports to meet basic needs.
   2. Strengthen self-sufficiency at village level in Papua, including by securing and enhancing the existing role of the non-cash economy;
3. Rights-based development, built on Papuan customary systems, to deliver economic justice and sustainability.

Phil addressed the current scenarios for global warming using C-ROADS including “business as usual” and the current state of confirmed proposals as determined using C-ROADS and available on the climate scoreboard. He also connected this to the delicate balance that particular developing countries are facing to combine economic growth, development, resource management and environmental protection. He stressed that solutions are not merely adopting those of others, rather can stem from daring to “think new” and thereby inspire others in the world as well.

The workshop will be followed by 2 more sessions, to generate a blueprint for sustainable development in Papua Province.

Further information: Phil Rice at philrice@sustainer.org

(January 19, 2010) The Climate Interactive team, led by Sustainability Institute, delivered big results in Copenhagen at the UNFCCC’s COP15 climate conference.

Bill McKibben wrote in the UK Guardian, from Copenhagen: “the only people who really understand what’s going on may be a small crew … called Climate Interactive. Their software speaks numbers, not spin – and in the end it’s the numbers that count.”

He is overstating our uniqueness, but here are the top ten most notable moments and achievements.

1. Obama heard (at least they tell us). From our office in Copenhagen hosted by the Rasmussen Foundation and Sea Change, 48 hours before President Obama’s arrival, we created two rounds of customized real-time C-ROADS analysis of the COP15 negotiations requested by and delivered to a top White House science advisor who briefed the President before his activities in Copenhagen. Felt honored to help.

2. Our Climate Scoreboard went viral. While we expected only dozens of blogs and Facebook pages to embed the “widget” we created, we found that over 1500 actually did and that sites around the world, in multiple languages, added the Scoreboard (supported by Morgan Family Foundation) to their online media. CBS, NPR, Boston Globe, YES!, Washington Post, ABC News, and Nature for example. While we expected a couple thousand visits, we witnessed over 300,000 visits to the Scoreboard! See videos of Beth Sawin presenting it are here and here.

3. Real time analysis of negotiations happened. As draft texts were released, we analyzed their impacts in C-ROADS (supported by Zennstrom Philanthropies) really fast. Press releases during Copenhagen are here.

4. C-ROADS analysis got to the negotiators. A dramatically leaked confidential UN document (reported in a scanned pdf version mid-conference by the UK Guardian) had the words “Climate Interactive” and “Climate Scoreboard” scrawled across the top! Check it out in the document.

5. Open source thrived. The International Herald Tribune, 350.org, and others used our ClimateScoreboard data to report the final state of the global deal. Our “open architecture” and “open source” approach, as designed by our teams from CitiGroup, SoL, IfPeople, and here at SI worked — we shared our C-ROADS simulation data output online and journalists and graphic designers used it well.

6. We got quoted all over the place. In The Washington Post, Nature, Dot Earth, and Newsweek among others.

7. New delegations are picking up C-ROADS. The United States State Department used C-ROADS “Common Platform” during the Copenhagen meeting. And, supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, we are adapting it for the Chinese Government. But during COP15, five other delegations asked for copies and demonstrations of the simulator (they are not ready to disclose their interest).

8. We are (happily) not alone. As shown in the joint press release from the first week of COP15, we are one of four prominent groups analyzing the state of the global deal. We now share this important role with Grantham University, Project Catalyst, and Climate Analytics.

9. We connected with Chinese colleagues. We met with Professor He Jiankun and his team in Copenhagen and are looking forward to future collaboration.

10. Our events were packed. At the side event we held at the US Center within the Bella Center — full video is here and US State Department testimonial here — the crowd was standing-room-only and full of questions.

Okay, enough patting our own backs. We’re here for climate results, not project results. Join us in 2010 to make them happen!

More photos are below.

The Children’s Declaration was one of the key results of the Children’s Climate Forum, held in Copenhagen leading up to the official climate negotiations. Sustainability Institute’s Dominic Stucker was one of the two Lead Facilitators of this week-long event, which was organized by UNICEF and the City of Copenhagen government.

The Children’s Declaration affirms that:

“The youth in the world are ready to take action, and we request the same of governments worldwide. The time for talk is over. Now, we hold you accountable to your commitments. The challenges may appear insurmountable, yet as stakeholders, our generation is ready to collaborate in this cause.

We commit to personal lifestyle changes that place the common good above our individual desires and current way of life. We commit to educate and empower ourselves and our communities to adapt to and mitigate the changing climate. We commit to engage and actively cooperate with all generations and governments in combating climate change. As our efforts alone will not be enough, we expect our leaders and fellow citizens to cooperate.”

The Declaration goes on to make specific mitigation and adaptation recommendations to governments and was presented directly to the President of the negotiations in the Forum’s closing ceremony. As a follow up, eight Climate Ambassadors went on to observe the negotiations and participate in media and side events.

The Forum brought together 165 participants, 14-17 years old, from 44 countries, and recognized the fact that children are especially vulnerable to climate change, as documented in the Save the Children report, Feeling the Heat: Child Survival in a Changing Climate.

The children exchanged personal stories from countries where the impacts of climate change are being felt most acutely – from Argentina to Bangladesh, Greenland to Zambia – and went on field trips to Danish sustainability projects and schools. A special highlight for the children was singing “It’s My World,” an inspiration to action, with a popular Danish music group.

Dominic, as part of the international 16-person Facilitation Team, helped integrate a visioning and systems thinking approach and brought in the often-neglected emotional side of climate change. He also shared the Climate Scoreboard with participants and organizers, developed by Sustainability Institute, MIT, and Ventana Systems. A widget that shows the state of the climate deal in real-time based on IPCC science and the C-ROADS climate model, the Scoreboard is featured on the Forum’s Unite for Climate web platform.

Importantly, participants also developed the Climate Ambassadors Program, which is designed to create a network of young climate activists, connected on the Unite for Climate platform, that empowers and trains young people to engage their local communities in the climate debate. The 20-page action plan helps translate the commitments expressed in the Declaration into local and national action projects.

“I learned a great deal from the dynamic Facilitation Team, committed organizers, and the Climate Ambassadors,” Dominic says, “and I feel inspired and hopeful about our continued efforts to work toward a sustainable future. Instead of dismay and exasperation – wondering how career negotiators can explain, after 17 years, the lack of a “fair, ambitious, and binding” climate treaty to young people – I feel a sense of grounded optimism from the younger generation.”

Read full story here: Greenopolis
Contact Dominic Stucker for more information: dstucker@sustainer.org