Reply To: Exercise 2: 5 Unsolved Problems
5 problems, Jim Jenkins
General Field: Food security
Problem: People feel frustrated and somewhat helpless when it comes to growing some of their own food and making their property more climate resilient because they don’t have the information, experience, space or example right in front of them to copy from. They suffer from many myths that it consumes significant time that they don’t have, they don’t have enough space and it has to cost a lot of money.
Solution: Develop a demonstration urban food garden and climate resilient yard site on local community property with QRcode identification and explanations of plant species, growing techniques, climate benefit information and awareness events whereby people can take the information and apply some of the same practices and ideas on their own property with a greater change of success. Engage experts to contribute and focus on in person sessions to improve follow through. Engage with Chef’s to develop and demonstrate recipes with ingredients that people are not familiar with.
General Field: Positive sustainability leadership
Problem: Mental health clinicians are seeing a growing number of patients suffering from climate change anxiety—also referred to as eco-anxiety, eco-grief, or climate doom as a result of the size of the climate change problem heralded in the news and civilization’s growing experience with weather disasters. These reports and events need to be taken seriously but they become overwhelming for people such that they feel they have no control, develop a negative belief, give up hope and become paralyzed with inaction. If there is no hope, there is very little ‘trying’ to make change for the better. Society is still making many mistakes yet there is a lot of learning going on and promising examples of progress to balance the negativity..
Solution 1: Develop a podcast for audiences who haven’t been reached, to bring to light examples of the positive advances on climate change and environmental sustainability that have been made along with the work and messaging of inspiring, positive, mindset changing speakers and their examples of how to think differently, to the forefront for audiences who are not aware of their work nor know where to look for it. There are a number of public figures (Christiana Fugueres, Per Espen Stoknes, Joshua Spodek) who have developed approaches such as Positive Optimism, Changing Apocalypse Fatigue into Action and the Spodek method to draw from.
Solution 2: Develop my own brand as a speaker on applied sustainability and with an irrepressible optimistic mindset
General Field: Sustainability Leadership
Problem: Many managers in organizations still believe sustainability is something the sustainability department mostly does and they feel threatened in an already overworked role that they will have pick up a new field. One that takes more work, requires them to redesign products, change manufacturing processes which cost more money and still maintain company profitability. Companies are starting to back away from stated sustainability projects over concerns about the impact to profitability.
Solution: Develop an understanding of current sustainability ROI calculation (Specifically work with Stern Sustainability Business) and propagate this methodology across related sustainability projects proposed, expect to propose and am involved in.
General Field: Hard to grasp sustainability concepts
Problem: A certain majority of the population are searching out and willing to purchase products with green attributes that imply they are less impactful for the environment. It makes them feel good that they are doing their part. They purchase these products with certain green expectations, and some do have a benefit but many people feel cheated when they find out the products are no better or perhaps worse than advertised within the whole picture of their impact (green washing). Often the information provided is incomplete and can be hard to understand to make a quick decision on whether to buy a product or not. Some product manufacturers wilfully mislead the buyer or don’t know what they are doing, thinking a small improvement in one area is sufficient without considering the others
Solution: Using greenwashing and green products as one example of many complex sustainability topics, the solution is to create a series of ‘how to think about _______’ videos or short explanations in an appealing format that are simple, to the point, easy to understand. Have them vetted and post them publicly (You Tube, web site, …) to drive better decision making, influence behaviour change and awareness.
Reflection:
1. How hard to identify the problem? Took a while, many problems are inter-related and narrowing them to become workable is a challenge. I probably have more work to do in this regard once I take another look at them.
2. Was it easy or hard to see the problem from the perspective of the people they affect? I don’t think it was hard but there is probably lots of nuance I could learn more of in some future discussions
3. Did it get easier with practice? Didn’t get any easier, yet, but expect it will with more experience.
4. Do your problems and solutions have much chance to become projects? These problems are items I’ve been observing so I think they are real. Some of them are big and will need some narrowing to make workable.