Elsevier

Futures

Volume 39, Issues 2–3, March–April 2007, Pages 215-229
Futures

Inventing a sustainable future: Australia and the challenge of eco-innovation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2006.01.007Get rights and content

Abstract

Australia's possible futures depend on choices that are made now. One key to Australia's directions and success will be its capacity to shape an environment for innovation which meets its broader economic, social and environmental goals. We argue from both past successes and future potentials that opportunities are available for Australians to frame for themselves an economically attractive and globally constructive role by shaping their strategies to facilitate eco-innovation directed towards environmental sustainability.

We contrast the role of past innovations in facilitating critical developments in the amelioration of the destruction of stratospheric ozone with current opportunities for Australia to contribute through innovation to resolving the problem of anthropogenic global warming and climate change. In particular, we focus on the powerful potential role of information technology in facilitating technological and social innovation towards sustainability through eco-innovation, and discuss key strategic principles in the context of the potential of technologies already under development. Such technologies offer exciting and important choices for Australians over the next few years.

Introduction

Australia stands in a world whose future is now very vulnerable to our own actions and choices. This is true for people as the dominant species, and also for the rest of the global ecosystem. With its unreliable rainfall, its eroding topsoil, its large number of endangered species, its history of inappropriately applied European agricultural choices, its emerging shortages of urban and agricultural water, and with its consequent sensitivity to perturbations to climate, Australia's environment is especially fragile. This vulnerability provides a foreground for the wide range of challenges facing Australians and the rest of the world: halting and turning around global warming, restoring the stock of natural capital, saving the oceans, reducing population growth, avoiding the scourge of new deadly epidemics, maintaining sustainable prosperity, reducing the growth in inequality between global north and south, avoiding the use of weapons of mass destruction, and bringing to an end the destruction of the world's biodiversity.

As with the rest of the world we also face a paradox: many of these problems have been precipitated or accelerated by human inventiveness, yet it will require human inventiveness to resolve them. We are therefore faced with the difficult problem of clarifying our attitude to scientific discovery, technological development, and more broadly to innovation. There are many meanings to innovation, but what we mean here is the process that takes an idea from conception to the point where it is applied in practice to meet human goals (whether those goals be good or bad). Innovation is not restricted to technological transformation but encompasses changes to social and organisational systems (often entailing changes in cultural values, attitudes and behaviour).

It may seem superfluous to talk about our attitude to innovation. But how innovation should be understood is contested. There has been a history of the development of thinking about innovation and underlying ideas that have been reinforced by it. The most obvious of these is the idea of progress which gained prominence from the 17th Century, first as an ideology to support a redistribution of power between the old landed aristocracy and the emerging merchant class, and later developing as one of the central claims supporting the development of the market [1]. Put simply, the idea (in its modern form) is that steady and continuous improvement to the human condition occurs through the process of scientific method and its application through investment in an ever expanding market.

This idea is supported and reinforced by many important discoveries and beneficial applications. At the same time, it is challenged by key problems thrown up by the use of these technologies and the processes that produce them. These include all the forms of environmental degradation that we have mentioned, as well as the capacity of technological innovation to structure-in forms of social inequality.

In Australia the approaches to this paradox have tended to reflect intellectual twists and turns which have taken place in the rest of the advanced industrial world. In the 1960s, a general uneasiness began to develop around the negative implications of innovation. Concern over arms races, the Vietnam war, and then nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the context of the Cold War were part of this. Accompanying this uneasiness was first the development of the initial wave of environmental consciousness, reflected by writers such as Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich and Murray Bookchin [2]. The second wave arose with a much more pervasive grip as the effects of environmental pollution began to bite at the regional and global scales [3].

Correspondingly, the first wave of concern from the 1960s to 1980s frequently reflected questioning of what might be wrong with scientific development to produce these outcomes. In response, there was considerable emphasis on devising small-scale alternative technologies, and new forms of lifestyle which would be more decentralised and in harmony with nature. The critique was legitimate enough, but it is also true that it has not had the power to turn around the problems it addressed. Whilst there were many bold experiments in alternative styles of living, and some of these survive in Australia, most failed, and few people, in comparison to the size of the population, embraced them.

It is not our purpose to argue these radical experimental reconstructions of ways of living were misplaced or unhelpful. Indeed, they have served to show that we can derive happiness from more long-held human attainments and strengths than consumption. But, paradoxically, for most people these experiments also underscore the extent of change required to achieve a sustainable lifestyle in the present context. What we do wish to argue is that it is possible to innovate to make the transition to a sustainable lifestyle less of a difficult chasm to surmount.

In short, for Australians, at least as much as for the rest of the mass consumption world, we need to invent paths which make necessary changes for sustainability more socially and technically attainable. This, in its truest sense, is an agenda for innovation for sustainability.

Section snippets

Innovation for sustainability

The need for innovation can be highlighted by considering the evolution of environmental impacts in Australia: almost any one of them will do—water, energy use, soil erosion, species extinction, or waste. And in thinking about the future in relation to this it is instructive to consider the recent past. For example, consider Australia's vulnerability to destruction of the ozone layer.

We may recall that it was only 20 years ago that a growing hole in the stratospheric ozone layer was discovered

The eco-innovation challenge

It is reasonable that global warming should be seen as having a particular iconic importance. Indeed, it would probably be widely accepted that if the problem of global warming cannot be solved, then we cannot have environmental sustainability. Perhaps, even though it is more likely to be contested, it can also be conceded that, if the obstacles in the way of a solution to global warming can be overcome, we will have something of a general template for tackling other major problems that need to

Six strategic principles for eco-innovation

The following principles are presented not simply as good ideas, but trends in contemporary understanding about the ways in which development can be moved towards sustainability within the context of eco-innovation. They were formulated and are developed in much greater detail by one of us elsewhere [12].

  • Focusing on prevention: There is a crucial shift from “end of pipe” mopping up pollution to preventing it from happening in the first place. The latter has been widely recognised as the only

The technological potential

The future is not predetermined. People can use their innovativeness to solve problems looming on the horizon. Two types of innovations have been identified as especially promising from the point of view of dematerialisation. One is the technological opportunities provided by advances in information and communications technology. The other consists of ideas about eco-efficient services that enable material goods to be used more efficiently [29].

If the threat of global warming is to be resolved

The road not yet taken

Enough has been said to indicate that for Australia, as for the rest of the world, the next few decades will be marked by the twin challenges of meeting greenhouse and other sustainability requirements, and the need to provide the social and technological innovation to make that possible. Our assessment is that this represents an enormous opportunity for Australia. But we are also of the view that the bulk of this challenge for Australia remains to be understood and adequately embraced.

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