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.John Sterman, "Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World, 2000, pp 5-10.
Overview of resistance to solving the sustainability problem
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:Environmental Encyclopedia, Second Edition, W. P. Cunningham et al., editors, 1998, page 1054.
"Many believe the most important result of the conference was the precedent it set for international cooperation in addressing environmental degradation. The nations attending agreed they shared responsibility for the quality of the environment, particularly the oceans and the atmosphere, and they signed a declaration of principles, after extensive negotiations, concerning their obligations. The conference also approved an environmental fund and an 'action program,' which involved 200 specific recommendations for addressing such problems as global climate change, marine pollution, population growth, the dumping of toxic wastes, and the preservation of biodiversity. A permanent environment unit was established for coordinating these and other international efforts. [This later became] the United Nations Environmental Program [which was] formally approved by the General Assembly later that same year and its base established in Nairobi, Kenya. This organization not only coordinated action but monitored research, collecting and disseminating information, and it has played an ongoing role in international negotiations about environmental issues.
"The conference in Stockholm accomplished almost everything the preparatory committed had planned. It was widely considered successful, and many observers were almost euphoric about the extent of agreement."
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.John Talbert et al., The Genuine Progress Indicator 2006, A Tool for Sustainable Development, Redefining Progress, The Nature of Economics, 2006, available at .
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:"The Limits to Growth", Meadows et al., 1972, p23.
"If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity some time in the 21st century."
Yet thirty-two years later in 2004 the third edition reported that:"Limits to Growth", Meadows et al., 2004, p xvi.
"[The second edition of Limits to Growth] was published in 1992, the year of the global summit on environment and development in Rio de Janeiro. The advent of the summit seemed to prove that global society had decided to deal seriously with the important environmental problems. But we now know that humanity failed to achieve the goals of Rio. The Rio plus 10 conference in Johannesburg in 2002 produced even less; it was almost paralyzed by a variety of ideological and economic disputes, [due to] the efforts of those pursuing their narrow national, corporate, or individual self-interests.
"...humanity has largely squandered the past 30 years."
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 [fossil fuel] 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.""Emissions rising faster this decade than last", CISIRO Media Release, September 25, 2008, available at .
The Copenhagen Climate Summit of December 2009 ended in failure."The Hartwell Paper", Prins, Gwrn et al., May 2010, available at . 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:Outcome of the work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention, 2010, available at .
"Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet, and thus requires to be urgently addressed by all Parties."
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:United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, United Nations, 1992, p2-4, available at .
"The Parties to this Convention... [acknowledge] that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response.... [thus the parties recognize] that States should enact effective environmental legislation... [to] protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind...."
Negotiations have bogged down so pervasively that: "Climate policy is gridlocked, and there's virtually no chance of a breakthrough."“Disaster at the Top of the World”, Thomas Homer-Dixon, New York Times, August 22, 2010, available at . "Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernible real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years."
The change resistance and proper coupling subproblems
Understanding change resistance requires seeing it as a distinct and separate part of the sustainability problem. Tanya Markvart's 2009 thesis on Understanding Institutional Change and Resistance to Change Towards Sustainability stated that:Tanya I. Markvart, Understanding Institutional Change and Resistance to Change Towards Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Theoretical Framework and Illustrative Application to Provincial-Municipal Aggregates Policy, 2009, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, pages 4, iii, and 157. Available at .
"It has also been demonstrated that ecologically destructive and inequitable institutional systems can be highly resilient and resistant to change, even in the face of social-ecological degradation and/or collapse (e.g., Berkes & Folke, 2002; Allison & Hobbs, 2004; Brown, 2005; Runnalls, 2008; Finley, 2009; Walker et al., 2009)."
The thesis focuses specifically on developing "an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for understanding institutional change and resistance to change towards sustainability."
Jack Harich's 2010 paper on Change Resistance as the Crux of the Environmental Sustainability Problem argues there are two separate problems to solve.Jack Harich, “Change Resistance as the Crux of the Environmental Sustainability Problem”, System Dynamics Review, January 2010. A root cause analysis and a system dynamics model were used to explain how:
"...difficult social problems [like sustainability must be decomposed] into two sequential subproblems: (1) How to overcome change resistance and then (2) How to achieve proper coupling. This is the timeless strategy of divide and conquer. By cleaving one big problem into two, the problem becomes an order of magnitude easier to solve, because we can approach the two subproblems differently and much more appropriately. We are no longer unknowingly attempting to solve two very different problems simultaneously."
The paper discussed the two subproblems:
"Change resistance is the tendency for a system to continue its current behavior, despite the application of force to change that behavior.
"Proper coupling occurs when the behavior of one system affects the behavior of other systems in a desirable manner, using the appropriate feedback loops, so the systems work together in harmony in accordance with design objectives. … In the environmental sustainability problem the human system has become improperly coupled to the greater system it lives within: the environment.
"Change resistance versus proper coupling allows a crucial distinction. Society is aware of the proper practices required to live sustainably and the need to do so. But society has a strong aversion to adopting these practices. As a result, problem solvers have created thousands of effective (and often ingenious) proper practices. But they are stymied in their attempts to have them taken up by enough of the system to solve the problem because an 'implicit system goal' is causing insurmountable change resistance. Therefore systemic change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first."
The proper coupling subproblem is what most people consider as "the" problem to solve. It is called decoupling in economic and environmental fields, where the term refers to economic growth without additional environmental degradation. Solving the proper coupling problem is the goal of environmentalism and in particular ecological economics: "Ecological economics is the study of the interactions and co-evolution in time and space of human economies and the ecosystems in which human economies are embedded."The New Pelgrave Dictionary of Economics Online, abstract.
Change resistance is also called barriers to change. Hoffman and Bazerman, in a chapter on "Understanding and overcoming the organizational and psychological barriers to action", concluded that:"Organizations and the Sustainability Mosaic: Crafting Long-Term Ecological and Societal Solutions", Sharma, S. et al., (Ed), 2007. Chapter 4, Hoffman, A. J., and Bazerman, M. H., "Changing practice on sustainability: Understanding and overcoming the organizational and psychological barriers to action," p85.