To transform complex systems, a framework for action is suggested, which emerged from the observation that most solutions currently proposed remain partial and do not address the various interconnected issues that characterise auto-adaptive systems. This framework was inspired by reflections on water and by several authors, starting with Jeremy Rifkin in « the Age of Resilience ».
How can we act to transform eco-social systems in a context of radical uncertainty and of an increasing pace of change? What principles can guide us? These broad questions have never been more urgent and important: our planet has become a large vessel threatening to get off track without serious course correction.Â
To help us in this endeavour, I propose a framework that rests on three building blocks to govern our mindset and to help us take or coordinate action. These are: efficiency, sufficiency, and resilience. Let us go through them one by one.
The concept of efficiency emerged with the Industrial Revolution. Transforming thermal energy into mechanical energy led to the development of thermodynamics, the art of maximising that transformation. Getting more with less soon became the North star of engineers. We all benefitted and still benefit from this search for energy efficiency. For instance, our cars use 5-6 times less petrol per kilometre of drive than they used at the invention of the internal combustion engine.
Efficiency
The search for efficiency comes together with the search for performance. It is therefore associated with the competitive mindset that prevails in many societies and organisations. The search for comparative advantages is an example of this mindset. Increased efficiency also means producing less waste (and less entropy) in our manufacturing, including being able to recycle that waste. Increasing efficiency is a way to minimise the pressure we exert on our key resources.
Measuring and monitoring are also essential to efficiency because regularly increasing performance in a competitive world requires understanding how much and for what reason we perform better or not.
We have been living in a world dominated by efficiency for at least one century. Or perhaps was this pillar invisibly present before? Wasn’t the Neolithic already an attempt to get more food for a given piece of land? Or was cooking food not an attempt to get more energy from the same quantity of edible products?
Efficiency takes us to competition, which takes us to growth. Competition implies that more is better because if we are more efficient in the way we use our resources, we believe -often unconsciously- that we can consume more. This is what William Stanley Jevons, an English Economist, identified in the middle of the 19th century as the paradox bearing his name. Jevons noticed that improving the efficiency of the steam engine tended to reduce the price of coal, making it more affordable to consumers. In turn, consumption increase did more than offset the efficiency gains. This paradox has been observed in many domains and is generally called the rebound effect. Note that this effect can affect the same commodity or another one. Several programmes aiming at efficiency gains in the heating of buildings have resulted in behaviour change of their dwellers, eventually increasing their energy consumption. In other cases, such as in the food domain, reducing food costs helps families access new commodities such as mobile phones.
Sufficiency
This is why, in our search for solutions, we need the second building block, sufficiency. Sufficiency stems from the recognition that more consumption is not necessarily better for us nor for our planet. It starts with personal consciousness of the fact that our health and well-being do not automatically increase when our consumption increases. Sufficiency is difficult to integrate into our life since it is in conflict with decades of evolution of societies that became dominant because of their addiction to growth.
Meat consumption offers a good example of this. Meat has long been a luxury food, and it remains so for a large proportion of the global population. Centuries of restriction have created an appetite for meat products which exploded when food production efficiency was boosted by the use of synthetic fertilisers. Our European consumption requires a production equivalent of 90 kg of meat per person and per year. In the US, this figure is around 120 kg. At the same time, the WHO tells us that the negative effects of meat on our health start at 40 to 50 kg per meat per person per year. Our health and our planet’s health are clearly related, states the UN in their One Health programme[1].
But personal changes will not be enough: personal behaviour and technology evolution need to be both embedded in our reflection on sufficiency. The rebound effect is deeply ingrained in our addiction to high-tech solutions. This is particularly visible in the development of numerical solutions, computers, internet, social networks, AI, which are spreading at an increasing rate in our societies. The automotive sector again provides interesting insights: an average car is currently equipped with around 1400 to 1500 semi-conductor chips and this number keeps growing when more functions are allowed by technical innovation. As a result, between 2000 and 3000 chips are predicted in the coming years. A similarly fast evolution can be observed with the development of AI tools.
Although difficult, we need to find ways to help sufficiency contribute to solving our challenges. One approach that is emerging is the sharing economy which privileges the collaborative use of commodities instead of their individual ownership. This approach valorises the fact that we do not use many objects of our toolboxes full time. So, sharing them with our neighbours can be sufficient to satisfy our needs. A complementary approach is that of product-service systems where producers do not sell a product but provide them through lease. The producers become service providers, and their interest is to provide consumers with reliable and long-lasting products.
It is interesting to note that these emerging solutions connect changes in individual behaviour with changes in the value chain organisation. They are likely to reduce the pressure on natural resources since they decrease the number of objects required while satisfying the needs of citizen-consumers. Of course, they cannot apply to all commodities, but they offer inspiring perspectives to address the risks associated with privileging efficiency.
Efficiency and sufficiency are critical to finding solutions, but they are not enough. Their major flaw is to consider mostly short-term goals while we live in a world that is experiencing a high rate of transformations spanning over decades. In this context we need to struggle against another foundation of our economy, our preference for the short term. Balancing our time preference is essential for the resilience of our societies and that of critical planetary functions. Â
Resilience
Resilience is therefore the third pillar of our framework. The concept emerged in child psychology in the second half of the 20th century and has progressively evolved to define the capacity of systems to recover after a shock (disease, disaster…). A lot has been written about resilience, often to oppose it to efficiency (e.g. Rifkin, 2022, Hamant, 2022). The search for efficiency translates indeed into weaknesses in an unstable world: supply chain breakdowns during the Covid crisis have exemplified this. Built on comparative advantage and just-in-time principles, many supply chains have become vulnerable to small disruptions. Lacking flexibility or redundancy, many companies could simply not manufacture their products for several months or even years. In an unstable world, anticipating uncertain events (the Black Swans of Taleb 2007) and our vulnerability to them as well as understanding the risks associated with our search for efficiency has become essential.
What makes a system resilient? Let’s consider two important characteristics: robustness and agility. Trees provide an interesting comparison. An oak is robust and can survive a big storm, but beyond a certain strain it can collapse abruptly. By contrast, bamboo is less robust and will be seriously shaken by the wind, but because of its flexibility, it is not likely to collapse abruptly. A system may in fact need to be agile when facing certain tensions and to be robust in other cases. An electric grid, for instance, may need to sustain tension caused by extreme weather events, but it should also allow generating electricity in a diversity of conditions occurring simultaneously.
Robustness and agility are therefore not opposed but constitute a polarity of qualities able to respond to risks of diverse quality and intensity. The capacity of risk anticipation and mitigation is an essential quality of resilient systems. To get this quality, the system needs memory. Assessing risks is, first of all, a matter of understanding what difficult conditions have been encountered in the past and at what frequency. This is the basis of insurance mechanisms. But for insurance to work, the risks should not change over time. Alas, in the unstable conditions in which we live, the future is no longer what it used to be! We have entered a world where uncertainty (i.e. uncertain risk conditions) is prevalent. This is not only the result of climate change, but also the result of the huge interconnectedness of our societies, which generates cascading effects almost impossible to predict. Hence, becoming resilient is at the same time increasingly important and increasingly difficult. And the search for resilience is in many ways opposed to the search for efficiency, as exemplified by the disruption of value chains during Covid crisis.
The polarity between robustness and agility is close to another, less obvious, polarity between adaptation and adaptability. Ecosystems provide interesting insights into it. In a changing environment, the adaptable, more agile species have a comparative advantage. Competition prevails in this context, and the species tend to follow an r-type reproduction pattern (i.e. a lot of offspring and little care for them). This pattern tends to generate high tensions on the available resources until regulation starts to operate. Progressively, the more robust and better adapted species to the new conditions become predominant. The system gets better organised, and a better balance between competition and collaboration emerges. The adapted species tend to follow a K-type reproduction pattern (i.e. smaller number of offspring and greater care for them). This polarity between adaptation and adaptability explains the dynamics in natural systems and probably also the dynamics in which our societies are currently evolving.
In a stable environment, such as the one humanity has experienced since the beginning of the Holocene, resilience is more closely associated with adaptation and collaboration. In a less stable environment —the one we are entering— adaptability and competition may become more important for resilience.
The overall framework (see Figure below) combines the different features described above. It provides overall guidance for those trying to develop solutions to complex problems. Ideally, solutions or portfolios of solutions should strive to optimize the three building blocks by considering the 12 different dimensions as tips to facilitate the analysis.
How to find an optimum is, however, a big challenge because of the complexity of the auto-adaptive systems in which we live. Before going there (e.g. in Part II), we will examine how natural systems that benefit from millions of years of trials and errors in evolution have gone about developing these three building blocks and articulating them.
References
Jeremy Rifkin, 2022. The age of Resilience. Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. St Martin’s Press
Olivier Hamant, 2022. La troisième voie du vivant. Odile Jacob Publisher
François Roddier, 2021. Thermodynamique de l’évolution. Un essai de thermo-bio-sociologie. Editions Parole
Daniel Zimmer, 2024. L’eau et la planète. Un avenir au compte-gouttes. Editions Charles Leopold Mayer
Jevons paradox: https://www.greenchoices.org/news/blog-posts/the-jevons-paradox-when-efficiency-leads-to-increased-consumption
Eric Chaisson. 2001. Cosmic evolution: the rise of complexity in nature. Harvard Publishers.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Evolution
Johan Röckstrom et al. 2023. Shaping a resilient future in response to Covid-19. Nature Sustainability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007. The Black Swan, the impact of the highly improbable. Random House Publishing Book
[1] https://www.who.int/health-topics/one-health#tab=tab_1