Sustainability and systemic change resistance

The environmental sustainability problem has proven difficult to solve. The modern environmental movement has attempted to solve the problem in a large variety of ways. But little progress has been made, as shown by severe ecological footprint overshoot and lack of sufficient progress on the climate change problem. Something within the human system is preventing change to a sustainable mode of behavior. That system trait is systemic change resistance. Change resistance is also known as organizational resistance, barriers to change, or policy resistance. The environmental sustainability problem has proven difficult to solve. The modern environmental movement has attempted to solve the problem in a large variety of ways. But little progress has been made, as shown by severe ecological footprint overshoot and lack of sufficient progress on the climate change problem. Something within the human system is preventing change to a sustainable mode of behavior. That system trait is systemic change resistance. Change resistance is also known as organizational resistance, barriers to change, or policy resistance. While environmentalism had long been a minor force in political change, the movement strengthened significantly in the 1970s with the first Earth Day in 1970, in which over 20 million people participated, with publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, and with the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. Early expectations the problem could be solved ran high. 114 out of 132 members of the United Nations attended the Stockholm conference. The conference was widely seen at the time as a harbinger of success: However, despite the work of a worldwide environmental movement, many national environmental protection agencies, creation of the United Nations Environment Programme, and many international environmental treaties, the sustainability problem continues to grow worse. The latest ecological footprint data shows the world’s footprint increased from about 50% undershoot in 1961 to 50% overshoot in 2007, the last year data is available. In 1972 the first edition of The Limits to Growth analyzed the environmental sustainability problem using a system dynamics model. The widely influential book predicted that: Yet thirty-two years later in 2004 the third edition reported that: Change resistance runs so high that the world’s top two greenhouse gas emitters, China and the United States, have never adopted the Kyoto Protocol treaty. In the US resistance was so strong that in 1999 the US Senate voted 95 to zero against the treaty by passing the Byrd–Hagel Resolution, despite the fact Al Gore was vice-president at the time. Not a single senator could be persuaded to support the treaty, which has not been brought back to the floor since. Due to prolonged change resistance, the climate change problem has escalated to the climate change crisis. Greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster than IPCC models expected: “The growth rate of emissions was 3.5% per year for 2000-2007, an almost four fold increase from 0.9% per year in 1990-1999. … This makes current trends in emissions higher than the worst case IPCC-SRES scenario.” The Copenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009 ended in failure. No agreement on binding targets was reached. The Cancun Climate Summit in December 2010 did not break the deadlock. The best it could do was another non-binding agreement: This indicates no progress at all since 1992, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was created at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The 2010 Cancun agreement was the functional equivalent of what the 1992 agreement said: