From Blueprints to Seeds … Reports on System Collapse … The Implosion of EU Green Regulation … Sunday Thoughts … LHK Podcast

Edition 30 | May 2025

If you skim through the broader variety of Linkedin posts, it all screams ‘solutions and services’ right into your face. Of course, Linkedin is a professional platform, a big marketplace of self-promotion and job offerings, based on a competitive mindset, given in by our economic system logic: be better, be cheaper, do more, deliver great value and impact. I guess for 99% it is that sort of navel-gazing, as selling and money-making is key.

For me, it’s not. For me, it is a way to express opinion, meaning, insight, and sometimes opposition to the mainstream and recklessness of the existing economic system logic. Do I get 50 likes or 5.000 likes or 10.000 views on any of my posts? I don’t really care, as writing by itself creates value for me. It is the active process of getting thoughts written down that give me orientation, positioning, and often new clarity. It’s first and foremost a service by myself and for myself, and if presented to others instead of filling black notebooks to then disappear in a cupboard, I feel privileged if they like, or comment, or discuss what I had put down. It is an ‘encore’ to the writings of r3.0 , more personal, creating a relationship of me with that professional ‘output’. But never has the distance been so small between personal and professional desires as in our newest r3.0 report, the first of various volumes of the SEEDS Series, and that’s why I start this Lighthouse Keeper edition with this report.

From Blueprints to Seeds

What does it really mean in all consequence when you realize that 35 years of trying to get sustainability into the center of corporate doing hasn’t gotten any further than tinkering around the edges, cosmetic corrections and continued incrementalism? What does it do to me (and as I know many others) to acknowledge that ‘collapse avoidance’ is a lost battle, and the war for human survival needs a new, heartbreakingly painful, but still encouraging new direction and an engaging storyline, at r3.0 we named it ‘collapse resilience?’ And how can I define my contribution to that new pathway?

One consequence we’ve taken is to not continue with writing ‘Blueprints’, our first decade focus output at r3.0, presenting a systemic and simultaneous leapfrog model of transformational change towards a regenerative economy. I still very much value this work of nearly 10 years as necessary, maybe the most advanced model of multilevel transformation out there. I’ve never seen something similar presented to the world, a global common good, ready for grabs, free of charge. But here’s the thing: It presented ‘solutions’, mostly in competition to the standard stereotypes of the existing economic system logic. Taking these solutions up would have meant disruption, needed on nano (personal), micro (organizational), meso (industry, region or portfolio) and macro (mainly economic system rules) level at more or less the same time. But the ever-so-nervous short-term hectic that the current economic system logic produces always made other problems and their ‘solutions’ more important. Was it Covid in 2020-2022 and shut-downs as a preferred way of creating solutions; or the war in Ukraine that started in the same year, the Israel/Gaza war that started a year later; all the elections that brought right-wing nationalistic tendencies to the forefront; or the trade tariff wars instigated by the Trump presidency, they all were and are front page news. The fact that climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation and basic resource shortages reach new record hights didn’t interest much anymore. Only when it came to forced dislocation (mistakenly often called migration), the nationalistic minds heated up, painfully unapologetic of hundreds of years of colonial regimes, racist and exploitative root causes of today’s problems. We are now at the point where thinking in ‘solutions’ becomes more and more impossible, and that’s why all political efforts, all national solo efforts, and globalization in general, are in my view bound to fail. As said, it’s too late for collapse avoidance, and still most deciders remain in that thinking pattern, that there are solutions to avoid collapse. It won’t help them, but they just don’t want to realize it, a quite conceited form of denial.

Asking ourselves ‘And Now What?’ we readjusted in ways that would be possible seeds for a bioregional future, eventually leading to future sprouting and blooming outside of all the economic system stereotypes that are killing us right now, day by day, minute by minute, just a little bit more.

We endeavoured towards exploring new ways to communicating, interactive, with a pluriversal mindset, and with the idea to weave in and between bioregions. We decided on three strategic pillars: supporting through convenings, through the creation of knowledge-commons, and through self-governance. They are all interdependent (and in that way continue our system thinking approach). And part of the creation of knowledge commons is to get clarity on the why and how of this support. Our SEEDS Volume 1 report, called ‘Our Predicament: The Fundamentals Flaws of Predominant Economic Systems – and the Cultures Scaffolding Them’, sets the basic understanding of why ‘solutions’ don’t work any longer. Here’s what it says in the introduction:

“Problems invite solutions. Predicaments, by contrast, invite navigation. The dilemma introduced by interpreting predicaments as if they are problems is the rush to solutions that actually achieve the opposite of their intention: they exacerbate the predicament, instead of alleviating the problem. “

The introduction continues: “Currently, humanity faces an existential predicament. Navigating through it requires understanding its causes – the fundamental systemic flaws, if you will – as clearly as possible. And then, pursuing paths in different directions. This inaugural Volume in the new r3.0 Seeds Series seeks such clarity on these fundamental flaws – particularly with our predominant economic systems, and the cultures scaffolding them – as a foundation for navigating elsewhere (which we explore in subsequent Volumes). Primarily, we shift to an interview-based research format: we invited 20-odd prominent thinkers and doers supporting a broad diversity of economic doctrines and cultural orientations to share their analyses. So, instead of seeking to assert a new analysis or doctrine, we sought to synthesize existing analyses and doctrines into a meta-analysis.”

For many years I was searching for a concise and crystal-clear analysis why the existing economic system design simply cannot work, why it has these brutal effects on nature and people, while making them think they grow, get richer, can gather more and more wealth, while also making them happier. This is the biggest mirage ever constructed by humans, and it replaced the 400.000 years of human bioregional organizing, the only ‘source code’ of interbeing that has ever worked. Having now produced this analysis by ourselves and delivering a second and third report on interventions within one year will give us so much more clarity for the collapse resilience work for the rest of the decade.

We therefore also close Volume 1 by turning to Nafeez Ahmed speaking of the Planetary Phase Shift that wehave the opportunity to navigate now:

“The ultimate direction of travel is clear: to collectively shepherd a new civilisational life-cycle entailing the metamorphosis of the superorganism from a dissipative structure into a regenerative one.”

You can find SEEDS Volume 1 on the Bioregionalism tab of our website. Also note that we have released all 20 or so interviews with these world-renowned thinkers, with links to all interviews to our Vimeo channel in Volume 1.

Reports on System Collapse

We have been overwhelmed with data on our culminating collapse in the last years already. Readers of the Lighthouse Keeper will surely acknowledge that I am a bit of a chronicler on those, so I will continue this with a set of newest information. There are four reports that I want to specifically highlight:

• Just recently, the Circular Gap Report of 2025 got released by Circle Economy. For those that will remember how enthusiastically the first version of the report about a decade ago reported that the amount of circular materials had been at 9.2% of all resources and all efforts would be needed to build up from that basis, the number actually decreased over the years and has now reached an all-time low of 6,9%, it was 7,1% last year. While these Circular Gap Reports have over the years increased in granularity and context (now 134 pages thick), the overall trend confirms: we are going backwards. I’ll just add here that this result is not just throwing resource use projections under the bus as projected by the UNEP Resource Panel, they also point even more towards collapse, as we know from the World 7 Model of the Club of Rome that projects that we’re running out of critical metals and minerals between 20235 and 2055. The effects on Global Warming, Deforestation, Ocean Acidification and Biodiversity Loss will be evenly severe.

• The 2024 European State of the Climate (ESOTC) report, compiled by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), paints a severe picture for Europe and contains an excellent graphics-rich Executive Summary. It says ‘Globally, 2024 was the warmest year on record and the first with an average temperature exceeding 1.5°C above the pre‑industrial level. The last ten years have been the warmest ten years on record. Concentrations of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane continue to increase. In Europe, the impacts of climate change are clear. Since the 1980s, Europe has warmed twice as fast as the global average, making it the fastest‑warming continent. This is partly also due to the proportion of European land in the Arctic, which is the fastest‑warming regionon Earth, and more frequent summer heatwaves. Extreme rainfall is leading to catastrophic floods, and heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe. Southern Europe is experiencing widespread droughts.’ Effects in other parts of the world are similar, but politics more or less globally put Climate Change on a low simmer, while the urgency is glitteringly clear. Too many problems at the same time, and looking for solutions (as explained above) is a strategy that’s bound to fail.

• The OECD comes out with their States of Fragility Report every couple of years, the new release came out in February this year.  It defines its focus as ‘Fragility is the combination of exposure to risk and the insufficient resilience of a state, system and/or community to manage, absorb or mitigate those risks. The OECD multidimensional fragility framework assesses fragility based on 56 indicators of risk and resilience across six dimensions (economic, environmental, political, security, societal and human) and 177 so-called contexts.’ Here are a couple of the most concerning outcomes, but beware, this is for the data geeks:

1. Political polarisation, increasing financing needs and data gaps are severely undermining the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. No context with high or extreme fragility is on track to achieve critical Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to peace, hunger, health and gender equality.
2. Negative trends related to security, political and economic dimensions are most prominent. These trends are closely connected to rising inequality, poverty, food insecurity and forced displacement. Contexts experiencing high and extreme fragility are home to 25% of the world’s population but 72% of the world’s extreme poor. By 2040, 92% of the world’s extreme poor could be living in contexts with high or extreme fragility.
3. Violent conflict is highly concentrated in contexts with high and extreme fragility. In 2023, 27 of the 61 contexts with high and extreme fragility were affected by organised violence.
4. Recent gains on gender equality are exposed to multiple threats. Eight of the ten contexts with the widest gender gaps are exposed to high and extreme fragility. Negative trends on gender equality and violence against women and girls are associated with democratic backsliding, as many leaders of autocratic and autocratising contexts instrumentalise gender issues for political objectives, curtailing women’s rights.
5. Contexts with high and extreme fragility generate and host the majority of the world’s forcibly displaced. Over 100 million refugees and internally displaced persons originate in contexts exposed to high and extreme fragility, representing almost four fifths of all forcibly displaced persons worldwide.

• The World Resources Institute (WRI) updated its ‘Forest Pulse’, drawing on the most recent data and analysis to reveal the latest trends in global forest loss and deforestation. The page is updated annually using annual tree cover loss data. Updates are released each year and cover the previous year’s trends. Here’s the newest data: ‘The tropics lost a record-shattering 6.7 million hectares of primary rainforest in 2024, an area nearly the size of Panama. Driven largely by massive fires, that’s more than any other year in at least the last two decades. According to new data from the University of Maryland’s GLAD lab and available on WRI’s Global Forest Watch platform, tropical primary forest disappeared at a rate of 18 football (soccer) fields per minute in 2024 — nearly double that of 2023. These are some of the most important forest ecosystems, critical for livelihoods, carbon storage, water provision, biodiversity and more. Their loss in 2024 alone caused 3.1 gigatonnes (Gt) of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to slightly more than the annual CO2 emissions from India’s fossil fuel use.’

What can we learn from these 4 reports? I always assess these reports from the four perspectives of Climate Change, Biodiversity Loss, Resource Unavailability and Displacement, the latter being a function of the first three, plus an additional set of social stress aspects in our hectic world. If I look at all the datasets, trends over the years and how insufficient reaction by nation states, politicians, corporates and often also NGOs are, I draw my conclusions from those. And having done so for about a decade, the picture seems pretty obviously clear: we are reaching the end phase of collapse, we’re over the abyss in freefall, and all that happens now is looking for parachutes while falling. But for most of us, there will be no parachutes!

The Implosion of EU Green Regulation

One outcome of this polycrisis stress is what happens then in political realms, and clearly to be witnessed in many capitals of the world: retraction! While the motives might be different (whereas it’s corruption-like wealth grabbing and broligarchy orchestrated by the White House, it’s short-sighted increasing longing for competitiveness of Europe), the effect is the same: regulations are reduced or fear complete erasure, silly enough this is called ‘simplification’, I call it the ‘EU Omnibus wreckage package.’

Many commentators try to still keep up the flag of simplification as improvement, but the more is taken away, the more it dawns to them that the EU Green Deal remaining is just a collapsing, once ambitious, plan, a shell with neglectable content for sustainability. And that’s important to remember: it is the E’S’RS or the C’S’DDD, the ‘S’ meaning sustainability. True sustainability, authentic sustainability, NOT JUST ESG PROGRESS! They are selling us pure incrementalism!

Here’s just a summary of what happened recently:

• A Stop-the-clock for those companies already reporting has been accepted;
• A two-year delay for all others has been decided upon;
• A reduction of the number of reporters of up to 80% (given higher employee and revenue thresholds) is decided, and now there is even discussion to reduce the thresholds again, a proposal of that is underway;
• Attack on the CSDDD: Germany and France say it should be abandoned completely;
• The SFDR and its related EU Sustainable Finance Taxonomy will be ‘revised’; outcomes still to be proposed, but expect less requirements too;
• Many signs of warning to not step forward by industries, finance institutions and central banks as well as scientists will most likely be ignored due to political power tactics in Brussels.
• The knock-on effects for sustainability raters, rankers and index-providers as well as ESG funds will be severe, with a high certainty that this will be overheard as well in Brussels (see below).

All in all, looking back at just the last year and when the ‘EU Omnibus Wreckage Package’ was first announced, I knew this would be the beginning of the end, making it neglectable regarding scale, scope and pace. This has nothing to do with sustainability anymore. Once again, the daily madness of the polycrisis overshadowed all possible progress.

Nevertheless, and this is repeating myself, we move forward with the UNSDPI Training(next time on June 24/25, seats can be booked here), the ONLY remaining authentic sustainability assessment that can lead to reliable sustainability reporting. The good thing is that this sort of data will become an essential litmus test for bioregional success and flourishing. THAT is a collapse resilience strategy to be followed, right there.

Sunday Thoughts

As always, in closing, please find the links to the Sunday Thoughts that I released since the last edition of the Lighthouse Keeper:

A Sunday Thought (#143): ‘BroBribery’ – The Normalization Of Corruption (May 18, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#142): ‚Social Media Nettiquette‘ – Being of Service To All (May 11, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#141): ‚Blackout‘ – a trigger for human decency?(May 4, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#140): ‘Francis‘- The Merciful Pope (April 27, 2025)

An (Easter) Sunday Thought (#139): ‘The Ghosts Of Our Wealth’ – The Next Generation’s Heritage (April 20, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#138): ‚Evolution or Revolution’? – Technologies as Drivers of History (April 13, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#137): ‘Nuthead Logic’ – Crashing The World Order on ‚Liberation Day‘(April 6, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#136): ‘Delay’ – The Naivety Of The EU CSRD Simplification Agenda(March 30, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#135): ‘Spring Solstice’ – a Celebration of Bioregional Life (March 23, 2024)

A Sunday Thought (#134): ‚Curing Devastation‘ – Soul Soothing through Designing YOUR Bioregion (March 16, 2025)

A Sunday Thought (#133): ‘Bioregional Nomad’ – learning to help thriving for all life! (March 9, 2025)

LHK Podcast

You might have seen or heard already that the Lighthouse Keeper is now also available as podcast on Podigee, Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Starting with the last edition (#29) and now with edition #30 as well, you can find the Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter on

Podigee: https://lnkd.in/eDeh3A4a

Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e4C2XnJj

Apple: https://lnkd.in/eEXVcfAi

This additional option is a response to the often voiced wish from readers to also have an audio version, as the Lighthouse Keeper Newsletter is written in essay-style and can be normally listened to in roundabout 20 minutes.