The Lighthouse Keeper is back, and it took a while. First, I took break from all the whirlwind in #ESGLaLaLand, and the huge amounts of tweets, posts and articles, while staying painfully (or blatantly) ignorant from getting to the core question: will any of this ‘White Noise’ ever create systemic sustainability value? I recently saw a photo from the 2023 GreenBiz conference where all the ESG nitty-gritty was discussed in a session, and lots of young people stared to the front with questioning eyes and faces, more of a ‘WTF am I getting here?’ expression, at least that was my impression. I also escaped the December/January jamboree of ‘the 10 tips for getting rich in 2023’ and ‘25 ways to be successful in ESG.’ 

Secondly, I waited for a long hoped for clarifying call with some of the movers and shakers in GRI, and needed to digest what we (my colleague Bill Baue and I) heard. Honestly, I am using this Lighthouse Keeper to express my grief about where GRI went since they started to publish standards in 2016, but also now understand that the GRI I once knew and worked for in the past simply doesn’t exist any longer. So, thank you GRI for that insight. I am saying goodbye to the idea GRI would ever be a ‘sustainability reporting set of standards’ and that its transparency would focus on replacing our unsustainable economic system with a system that ensures regeneration and thriving. It’s not, and they clearly diminished their ambition since they started so courageously in 1997 and that I was so proud to work for. They have changed to (my interpretation) ‘survival mode’ in the changing climate of regulatory approaches, lots of old ideals got thrown overboard. Even more important we now have the UNSDPIs (UN Sustainable Development Performance Indicators). Why?  Read more about all that below.

Lastly, I am going to delve a bit deeper into this new field called ‘Collapsology’. Those that read my Sunday Thoughts (every Sunday between 8-9 am CET on my profile) came across some of that wording already, and I also addressed it in earlier Lighthouse Keeepers. Time to put a bit more backbone to that as there are now between 20.000 and 70.000 people that are seeing these Sunday Thoughts on a regular basis, the threads below them are often rich and the private messages I receive are often heart-breaking. The ‘aware crowd’ is mourning immensely and deals with grief and trauma about all the losses we see – if we allow ourselves to see them. 

Goodbye to the GRI I once knew

To start with, I was involved with GRI since early 1998 onwards, being a European Industry Expert (from Siemens) in the GRI work streams that led to G1 (2000) and G2 (2002). I joined GRI in mid-2002 when the Amsterdam Office opened at Keizersgracht 209, and the time until I left in 2008 were wonderful years, full of engagement with the GRI Board, the Stakeholder Council and the many working groups. I owe GRI and especially Allen White (co-founder together with Bob Massie – and a true mentor) so much. In this time (2005/2006) G3 was conceived, and I was – while having a COO/CFO/CIO function – also responsible for the Principles Work Stream of G3. The Sustainability Context Principle had my special attention, as – apart from all other technicalities and disclosure topics – this was in my view the only connection of the GRI Guidelines with true sustainability. Take that Principle away and the only thing that’s left is performance/efficiency measurement in areas of interest that have something to do with environmental and social topics. They won’t measure sustainability, just progress without setting a ‘when is good good enough’ threshold. The difficulty at that time was data availability for the ‘denominator data’ (consider an indicator in which the numerator shows the ESG performance of a specific topic, and the denominator shows the relevant allocation that a company would need to adhere to, say its ‘budget’, based on scientific or norm-based thresholds) one would measure performance against, but the Sustainability Context Principle stayed in-tact. In 2008 I left GRI, partially because I did not see willingness by the Board of GRI to actually enforce the Sustainability Context Principle, the argument was ‘let’s first get many more to report in accordance with GRI, we’ll deal with context later.’ ESG was invented to feed the needs of the financial sector, but it was always clear it needed ‘denomination’ at some point…and then got forgotten! During the G4 development process I was with Deloitte, and my main plea in the G4 Principles Working Group was to add a ‘performance assessment’ requirement weaved into the process of applying the Report Content Principles, and while that was proposed in the draft for public comment of G4, it disappeared in the final version, and radio silence why it was taken out. That’s my story as far as my active involvement in GRI is concerned. 

In 2016 I attended the last Global GRI Conference and remarked in an article that GRI ‘has lost its soul’, the GRI standards were just announced, and I felt a total disconnect with GRI’s (once created) mission and vision, but also with their community. I wrote about atmospheric distortions, necessities and to-do’s. This article went quite viral and I know from many contacts it hit a nerve.

GRI went on, published Standards from 2016 onwards, defined a multi-year work program and revamped the Universal Principles section in 2020/2021.  Now here’s why I consider GRI not to be the organisation I was once part of and working with any longer. As this is a quite long part you can only read the headlines and delve deeper as you wish.

The Sustainability Context Principle (2021) allows an ‘as if’ approach for reporters

GRI G2 and G3 were in my view crystal clear that any performance needed to be compared to the thresholds and allocations relevant in all areas of impact. For example, GRI G3 literally said: ‘Reporting only on trends in individual performance (or the efficiency of the organization) will *fail* to respond to this underlying question. Reports should therefore seek to present performance in relation to broader concepts of sustainability. This will involve discussing the performance of the organization in the context of the limits and demands placed on environmental or social resources at the sectoral, local, regional, or global level.‘ Can a ‘MUST DO’ be any clearer? To GRI’s defense, and as already stated above, GRI never enforced its very own Principle since G2 in 2002, and hasn’t done so until today. GRI also offered ‘report checks’ that didn’t assess to what level these deliberations were to be found in ’sustainability reports’. It’s a check, not an assessment, they said.

How does that now compare to the new Universal Standards and the revised Sustainability Context Principle? Why do we consider it to be much weaker? There are minimally 3 reasons for that:

• Erasure of the term ‘Performance’ – and replacing it with the term ‘impact’. Performance has been a prominent aspect of the principle since its introduction already in the Second Generation (G2) of Sustainability Reporting Guidelines that GRI released in 2002. Placing “performance information in the broader biophysical, social, and economic context lies at the heart of sustainability reporting.” The original definition also states that reporters should consider the “performance of the organisation in the context of the limits and demands placed on economic, environmental, or social resources at a macro-level.” The term “performance” has continued to play a fundamental role in the definition of Sustainability Context through all successive generations of GRI Sustainability Reporting Guidelines (G3, G3.1, and G4) and through to the GRI Standards (2016), where the term is mentioned not five but seven times in the Sustainability Context Principle definition. The Universal Standards employ the term “performance” 16 times – but not once in the revised Sustainability Context Principle definition!
• Use of language – In place of the term “performance,” the Universal Standards employ terms such as “draw on” or “with reference to” (“report information on its impacts with reference to broader sustainable development conditions and goals, as reflected in recognized sector-specific, local, regional, or global instruments (e.g., reporting total GHG emissions as well as reductions in GHG emissions with reference to the Paris Agreement)”). According to these definitions, a reporting organization would be able to simply make reference to the Paris Agreement (regardless of its performance vis-à-vis the Paris Agreement), and still be in full compliance with the Sustainability Context Principle. The difference between the terms draw on / with reference to on the one hand, and performance on the other, is the difference between sustainability as a metaphor, and sustainability as a literal state of being in the real world.
• Removal of the practice of “allocation”, which all previous definitions of the Sustainability Context Principle had required, in calling for organization to report their “performance in the context of the limits and demands placed on economic, environmental or social resources, at the sectoral, local, regional, or global level” (to quote from the most recent instance, the 2016 Standards). Allocation calls for making this micro-macro link between organizational performance and broader performance “limits and demands” and is required in order to assess sustainability in a literal, real-world fashion.

When we argued in that direction (the above text snippets are from r3.0’s public comment letter that was signed by 19 long-time sustainability experts) in our recent call with GRI, we heard that GRI did extensive research and couldn’t find a fitting definition of performance that would be in line with the GSSB’s mandate and therefore switched to the term impact. I leave it up all readers to ask themselves which term is more vague; in fact one can say both are vague and need a further clarification like ‘sustainable’ or ‘unsustainable’ in front of them. We were surprised to hear there was no fit to the mandate of the GSSB, namely ‘to illuminate the impact of business activities on the economy, ecology and society’, of course only for material topics.

GRI is a standard for sustainability reporting without properly defining sustainable performance

I am ready to be torn apart here for just offering my opinion, but if a standard wants to be a ‘sustainability’ reporting standard, should it not minimally define a state when any performance (or impact for that matter) is considered sustainable or unsustainable? Instead, GRI leaves that to others. GRI 1 – Foundations (2021) says: ‘The Standards contain disclosures that allow an organization to report information about its impacts consistently and credibly. This enhances the global comparability and quality of reported information on these impacts, which supports information users in making informed assessments and decisions about the organization’s impacts and contribution to sustainable development.‘ So, that means that GRI just gives the ‘tools’ to allow anybody else to make an assessment, it’s not GRI’s responsibility to do so. Why? It says in GRI 1 – Foundations (2021) ‘It is important to note that the GRI Standards do not set allocations, thresholds, goals, targets, or any other benchmarks for good or bad performance.’ Suffice to say that when GRI defines the numerator information reporters should collect, why should it not provide guidance on how to integrate the denominator information needed as well, that would have at least closed the feedback loop to the Sustainability Context Principle. As it stands right now GRI stops one step before the gate by pushing it to others to do so. Is that sufficient for a ‘standard’? Furthermore, GRI 1 – Foundations (2021) also often refers to other ‘authoritative international instruments’ as a surrogate for defining limits, e.g, the IPCC, the UNGPs for Human Rights or the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. But do they give sufficiently necessary guidance for how to set thresholds and allocations? Decide yourself!

GRI topic-specific standards start to add certain thresholds over time, but don’t define sustainability

Well, GRI does so in some standards, but not yet in others. Before 2016 they didn’t do so at all, given the problems with data availability and GRI’s lack of ‘appetite to enforce’ the Sustainability Context Principle, letting the pendulum swing towards ‘just opinions’ of the reporting organization in concert with their stakeholders. Today, it’s all dependent on the GRI’s GSSB work plan, a multi-year program that they decide upon after consultation. We are invited to publicly comment on the new standards as they will be developed and that would ‘build in the tools’ one can refer to, to then let others assess the sustainability impact. Thanks for the offer, but how effective is it a) to see your comments put alongside a weakened Sustainability Context Principle, b) an unwillingness to first reopen the Universal Principles and get the shortcomings corrected before turning to topic-specific standards, and c) the danger that reporters ‘may not’ report them and still be in full accordance to GRI Standards. All this said, I am, very well aware that GRI simply may not have the resources for such steps, especially when it is challenging enough to fund the existing work spectrum. But what does it mean to be told this will need to wait for many more years to come? Its that acceptable?

The ’reason to exist’ for GRI has drastically changed

When GRI started there were only ideas for the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, no UN Guiding Principles for Human Rights, no Paris Agreement and no SDGs, no UN Global Compact, no ISO standards around sustainability topics, and Corporate Governance Standards that recognized sustainability as a governance topic just came into being around the turn of the millennium. There were absolutely no regulation approaches. All these are now in place or in the making, and GRI is still a voluntary initiative, setting standards. With the I?SB (that sucked in the IIRC, SASB and CDSB) internationally and the ESRS in Europe, GRI needs to defend its positioning and all three now created what’s called ‘interoperability’ to justify their right to exist. All this doesn’t help reporters that now need consultancies to understand and cut through the complexity, and the assurance providers shout hooray as per the increase of assurance mandates in lieu of the coming regulatory regimes. A huge money-making machine has been set in motion, but to what end? The majority of what I see is mainly ‘impact valuation’ based. What do I mean by that? The UNRISD Manual defines that as ‘amethod used to quantify or calculate the value of the magnitude of an impact. Impact valuation indicators are incrementalist in the sense that they are used to assess the size and marginal change, if any, in the stocks and flows of vital capitals from, say, one year to the next. Such changes are often expressed in terms of their relationships with other variables, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per unit of revenue or per unit of production. This is sometimes referred to as performance intensity.’ Might that be the real reason why GRI moved from performance to impact? Is it a ‘question of survival’ to align on that very same level, and not be more ambitious than others?

GRI invented ‘Double Materiality’ and went back to pure ‘inside-out’ materiality

The interoperability myth now set in motion explains that ‘we [GRI] have been working with the IFRS Foundation to develop a global comprehensive reporting system, which equally addresses the impacts of a company on the world (GRI) and the impact of the world on the company (ISSB). Together, the IFRS and GRI standards will offer a complete and robust suite of sustainability disclosure standards to assess a company’s behaviour, strategy, enterprise value and impacts. […] An important consideration will be for this system to be complemented, as needed, by jurisdictional reporting requirements – reflecting the specific local context, existing legal frameworks and ambitions. The ESRS are a good example of how this can be effectively achieved.’ I still remember the ‘good old’ G3 days some 17 years ago in which this reads completely different, e.g. ‘Materiality for sustainability reporting is not limited only to those sustainability topics that have a significant financial impact on the organization. Determining materiality for a sustainability report also includes considering economic, environmental, and social impacts that cross a threshold in affecting the ability to meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations.’ The GRI Standards scope as of today shrunk, and opened the gate for others to take over the outside-in perspectives. Probably GRI saw this as a wise step as the classical outside-in proponents like the mighty COSO (the high priests of risk management, mainly also the stance the TCFD took) or IFRS (on finance) would cover such risk-motivated Enterprise Value Creation parts of double materiality or claim that that’s their exclusive territory. I am ambivalent if that’s so wise, it simply also made ‘interoperability’ within different standards a necessity. Did it make life easier for reporters? Hell no!

Should we let go of GRI?

I am not alone in my concerns of GRI as it presents itself now. Alice Kalro wrote an important blogpost on Linkedin in which she says ‘I argue that the currently mainstream sustainability reporting guidance has very limited potential to actually work: not only does it not lead to progress towards real-world sustainability, but in practice, companies cannot comply with it in spirit’, consequently headlining her intervention with the question ‘Is it time we sunset the GRI standards, and the thinking that made us adopt them?’

Saying it with a broken heart: I rather don’t want GRI to sunset, I want GRI to turn back mistakes and then offer thresholds-and-allocation-based MUST-DO indicators and require their reporting (which means to humbly allow companies to very clearly state where they are on their trajectories to zero negative impact or gross-positive regeneration). That would include a reconsidering of their existing Sustainability Context Principle and then consequently embrace the UNSDPI indicators logic and deepen those within their topic-specific standards on how to translate that into more specific indicators. It would ask reporters to do a performance assessment and not leave it to ‘others to assess’. Agency and accountability must remain with the reporting organization, and be part of the reporting process, and the report itself. As long as that is not the case, it is simply not a ‘Sustainability Report’. Regional legislators could refer to it (as the ESRS could), but it would avoid ‘co-optation’ of the term sustainability by organizations like the I?SB. The latter may anyway face legal scrutiny as recently noted by Prof Paul Watchman. 

Is my wish realistic? Would that solve Alice Kalro’s concerns? Realistically it would lead to mostly every reporting organization state their level of ‘unsustainability’, but that’s not a surprise, isn’t it? It would also mean the trajectories towards zero negative impact need to be much more ambitious and much closer in their delivery than 2050-2100. It would potentially lead to new level playing fields in industries, on when to call an investment a sustainable investment and it could lead to ratings, rankings and indices that may be enable to benchmark on real sustainability and who’s best in class.

Not realistic, you say? Well, then the UNSDPIs might be the only solution left.

I am closing this GRI chapter for me here. As r3.0 we will still publish a more official statement, but personally I don’t see GRI as a potential driver of necessary change any longer. They go with the flow, until the flow runs dry.

UNSDPI Training

I wrote about the UNSDPIs in the last Lighthouse Keeper already. We at r3.0 and our delivery partner CSO consider it to be the leading context-based indicator assessment allowing an ‘authentic sustainability assessment.’ The first UNSDPI Training happened in January, another one this week and two more are planned for March 29/30 and April 19/20 (and potentially more to come). We are also receiving questions by bigger firms for separate confidential sessions. It is so great to see the level of interest, especially in the light of the above. Here are a couple of quotes of people who went to the training so far:

Glenn Frommer, ESG Matters: ‘As a professional with over 20 years of writing, consulting and assessing hundreds of sustainability and integrated reports, I found the recent online training on Context Based (CB) Performance Indicators to be one of the most useful and insightful courses I have attended in almost as many years. Having myself attended and taught numerous training sessions on indicators, ESG frameworks and ratings, materiality, reporting, auditing, assurance and more, I found this course to be a significant step forward for our industry. I give this course my highest recommendation and encourage all serious-minded sustainability professionals to participate in the future courses.’ 

Roland Bulten, InsideOut: ‘Highly recommended training. Organizations concerned with sustainability are now offered a practice which cuts to the chase. Practical, workable  indicators and template. This alternative is clearly the new no.1 sustainability approach for companies, adds greatly to the necessary conscience and offers an important missing piece for broader societal challenge. I do see the simplicity of the SDPIs as offering something special.’

Remi Strauss, 3 Peaks CPA: ‘Bill, Mark and Ralph delivered the UNSDPI training very professionally. The materials serve as a helpful reference to signpost learning already conquered or yet to be embraced. Q&A in the chat stream were invited and embraced throughout the four modules. The talent in the room speaks to the significance of the training. Well done to r3.0 and CSO for the milestones met and obstacles overcome to integrate context-based sustainability into the UN SDPIs.’

Michael Lennon, CAIPP: ‘Imagine being to hang out with leading luminaries for an intimate learning experience and ask them exactly how they pushed the learning edges of the field. In this course, you get to have those conversations. You’ll get numerous revelations about the movement to amplify organizational systems thinking and reporting, helping you to develop a vivid sense of where learning and implementation frontiers are. The content is fantastic.’

I leave it here with a recommendation to consider the UNSDPI Training for yourself, registration is possible at https://www.r3-0.org/un-sdpi-training/. 

Collapsology

An earthquake in a region that has a history of earthquakes for hundreds of years. In our modern times, nobody has to die because of an earthquake because the science is clear, the construction sector adopts earthquake-secure buildings, the disaster teams are in place and supplies are regularly replaced and stored for a situation that could come any minute. The people living in the areas are trained on how to shelter (if at all necessary), support others, first aid kits are in every household and defibrillators and medical support available, as that region is known to be at the edge of two tectonic plates that are pushing towards each other. Depending on the magnitude and length of a potential earthquake several escalation levels are defined and necessary help would be available within hours. That’s the theory. What happened in Turkey and Northern Syria is the reality. It might be that other places might be a bit better prepared, but in general this is what’s called collapse and seems to always come out of the blue for the many that are living in their ‘illusion of separation’ bubble. Based on wishful thinking that it’s all not going to be as bad as scientists forecast, eroded democratic processes and economic greed, we meander backwards.

Now consider the following headlines and short summaries from just the first couple of weeks of this year:

• Many risky feedback loops amplify the need for climate action (Rockström, Schellnhuber, and other renowned climate scientist): Many feedback loops significantly increase warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. However, not all of these feedbacks are fully accounted for in climate models. Thus, associated mitigation pathways could fail to sufficiently limit temperatures. A targeted expansion of research and an accelerated reduction of emissions are needed to minimize risks. 
• The Forest Report (Global Canopy Project): We are three years past the 2020 deadline that many organisations set themselves to halt deforestation, and just two years away from the UN’s deadline of 2025 for companies and financial institutions to eliminate commodity-driven deforestation, conversion and the associated human rights abuses. Yet, 201 (40%) of the companies and financial institutions with the most exposure to, and influence on tropical deforestation still haven’t set a single policy on deforestation. 
• Rising tide of climate litigation sweeps up Holcim and Danone, along with Shell (Reuters): Earlier this month ClientEarth filed a lawsuit against 11 Shell directors in the UK for failing to manage the “material and foreseeable” risks posed by climate change, backed by a group of institutional investors. The move was well timed, coming just after Shell, along with the other Western oil majors, announced record profits.
• Carbon Colonialism: Can carbon credits really save the planet? (Four Corners): In the race to curb catastrophic climate change, prominent Australian businesses have been enthusiastic customers of carbon credits. They’ve been offsetting their emissions by buying credits from companies promising to stop exploitative timber harvesting, whilst lifting locals out of poverty. But reporter Stephen Long has found that there is a vast chasm between what is marketed and what is really happening on the ground. In a month-long trip, the team travelled to some of the most isolated villages in Papua New Guinea. They uncovered environmental devastation in the very areas one company claimed to be protecting and indigenous landowners angry at unfulfilled promises. Long asks, who will really benefit from the carbon trade?
• Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor 2023 (New Climate Institute): Most companies’ climate strategies are mired by ambiguous commitments, offsetting plans that lack credibility and emission scope exclusions, but replicable good practice can be identified from a minority. The 24 companies assessed in the report are major multinationals contributing to approximately 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. They are prominently highlighting their climate leadership credentials but demonstrating a general lack of progress since the 2022 CCRM last year.
• Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook (University of Hamburg): Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is currently not plausible, as is shown in a new, central study released by Universität Hamburg’s Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS). Climate policy, protests, and the Ukraine crisis: the participating researchers systematically assess to what extent social changes are already underway – while also analyzing certain physical processes frequently discussed as tipping points. Their conclusion: social change is essential to meeting the temperature goals set in Paris. But what has been achieved to date is insufficient. 
• Be warned: the next deadly pandemic is not inevitable, but all the elements are in place (The Guardian): Bird flu is a mass killer, and mink farms are perfect for infection and transmission. They are a grave threat and must be banned. So who is the homicidal maniac in this story? It’s a scarcely examined abstraction we call “the economy”, a monster to whom anything and everything must be sacrificed without question or resistance: farmed animals, wild ones, even, unless we are fortunate, human beings in their millions. We will prevent the pandemics of the future only when we value life ahead of money.
• We Can’t Have Climate Justice Without Ending Computational Colonialism (Current Affairs): Existing climate “solutions” assume the continuation of the environmentally destructive lifestyles of the global rich, at the expense of the rest of the world. If we’re serious about addressing the crisis we have to put the costs on those who caused the problem.
• Data-driven predictions of the time remaining until critical global warming thresholds are reached (PNAS): Our results confirm that global warming is already on the verge of crossing the 1.5 °C threshold, even if the climate forcing pathway is substantially reduced in the near-term. Our predictions also suggest that even with substantial greenhouse gas mitigation, there is still a possibility of failing to hold global warming below the 2 °C threshold.
• UN boss to Davos: You’re the problem (Politico): António Guterres warns that the race to increase fossil fuel production is ‘inconsistent with human survival. Today, fossil fuel producers and their enablers are still racing to expand production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival. This insanity belongs in science fiction, yet we know the ecosystem meltdown is cold, hard scientific fact.’
• The global economy is measured to be 7.2% circular today (Circl Economy): The global economy is measured to be 7.2% circular today—dropping from 9.1% in 2018 when Circle Economy first calculated the figure. It means that of the landmark 100 billion tonnes of virgin materials extracted from Earth annually, only 7.2% make it back into the economy in the form of recycled materials. Over the past six years alone, the global economy has extracted and used almost as many materials as over the course of the entire 20th century, finds the Circularity Gap Report 2023. 

Just taking these pieces of new into consideration, I agree with a growing number of academics and many others that we need ‘Collapsology’ as a new field that needs attention and support. I conclude that we as humanity are way beyond avoidance of a well-predicted global collapse. Anything else is just tinkering around the edges. The belief in technical solutions is a pipe dream (as we run out of resources necessary for these technologies to have scalable impact in all parts of the world). A collapse will not present itself in one shock event (like the earthquake in Turkey and Syria), but in many shockwaves in self-reinforcing cycles, like the Domino/Hothouse Earth effects of climate change. 1.5 degrees is beyond possible, a world between 2 and 2.7 degrees most likely. The question is how can we best adapt in ways that are least impactful to all humans and GAIA, and how do we create the mindsets and structures in a post-collapse world. In a recent talk at WEAll, I sketched various directions for rejuvenation. It’ll ask a lot from us, but what other choices do we all really have:

• Turning to degrowth (what is it we truly need, where from and for whom, in what pace?)
• Designing bioregionalism (watersheds as defining boundary setting, about 200 globally, letting go of the idea of nation states as the only possible unit of measurement)
• Weaving between bioregions (sociocratic governance, currencies, relations, learning)
• Design of market mechanisms in an overall bioregional context of the commons, using thresholds & allocations as the factual ‚supply & demand‘ theory
• Developing the necessary incentive structures for the 5Ts (true costing, benefiting, pricing, taxing, remunerating) to function in service of regeneration
• Bringing in Global South/Global Majority and margin-centered (indigenous) wisdom into the forefront as 80% of the world’s inhabitants live there
• Developing prosocial norms, triggering benefitial tipping points
• Last but not least, learning to grieve and see trauma where it occurs; but also learning to rejoice in successes (as they do happen)

r3.0 Conference 2023 (12/13 September in a hybrid format)

With this in mind we also designed the r3.0 2023 conference. This year’s theme is Activating Restorative Norms: Healing Harm, Connecting for Change. The conference will cover four main themes:

• RESTORATIVE ECONOMICS – Redesigning economies to thrive through regeneration & distribution.
• COMMON GOOD GOVERNANCE – Reorienting governance from individual ownership to collective stewardship models.
• MARGIN-CENTERED WISDOM – Natural & cultural evolution thrives in the fertile soil on the peripheries.
• TIPPING INTO PROSOCIAL NORMS – Triggering beneficial social norm tipping points to avert adverse tipping points. 

The website www.conference2023.r3-0.org just went online. 

Sunday Thoughts

It’s been 3 months since the last Lighthouse Keeper, hence quite a number of Sunday Thoughts as well. Feel free to delve into as many as you like, and continue to find them on my LI profile every Sunday morning between 8-9 am CET. 

I realise this is a very long Lighthouse Keeper edition. Next editions will be shorter, so maybe this is more of a weekend read than a quick in-between read. Be well, all!