Sustainability

Fundamental systems transformations are needed to address the global emergency brought on by climate change and related global trends, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which, together, pose existential threats to the future of humanity. Transformation has become the clarion call on the global stage. Evaluating transformation requires criteria. The revised Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development/Development Assistance Committee criteria are adequate for business as usual summative and accountability evaluations but are inadequate for addressing major systems transformations.

Sida-commissioned report demonstrates how good business intentions might “bite back” in low- and middle-income countries and offers insights into how to avoid it.

Highlights: 

In this blog, Jem Bendell and Katie Carr explore "deep Adaptation" - the personal and collective changes that might help us to prepare for – and live with – a climate-induced collapse of our societies

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living wo

From our Gulf of Maine Blue Marble Hub in Portland Maine, we have a Love Story about Nature. In today's world, the dominant worldview is one where humans have control over nature. What if our love for the abundance that nature provides can be translated as legal status as a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services that we quantify and sell like a commodity? The Latin word anima (source of the word animal) is actually translated as spirit, breath, life.

In writing about transformation in Blue Marble Evaluation, I quoted Million Belay, coordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, who said: “At last there is a realization that change, fundamental change in the way we are living, is needed.” I met Million at