'Net positive', from Positive Development (PD) theory, is a paradigm in sustainable development and design. PD theory (taught and published from 2003)Birkeland, J. (2003) 'Retrofitting: Beyond Zero Waste', in KLM-UC International Conference Proceedings, University of Canberra, ACT, AustraliaBirkeland, J. (2004) 'Building Assessment Systems: Reversing Environmental Impacts', Nature and Society Forum, ACT, Australia, http://www.naf.org.au/naf-forum/birkeland (accessed 2005)Birkeland, J. (2005) 'Reversing Negative Impacts by Design', in Sustainability for the ACT: the Future's in our Hands, Office of Sustainability, ACT, Australia. was first detailed in Positive Development (2008), and detailed in Net-Positive Design (2020). A net positive system/structure would 'give back to nature and society more than it takes' over its life cycle.Eco-positive impacts of development must keep pace with human consumption (or ecological footprint) and offset past losses of nature, as defined in Positive Development (Ibid) p. 6. In contrast, conventional sustainable design and development, in the real-world context of excess population growth, biodiversity loss, cumulative pollution, wealth disparities and social inequities closes off future options. To reverse the overshoot of planetary boundaries, a 'positive Development' would, among other sustainability criteria, increase nature beyond pre-urban or pre-industrial conditions.A sustainable building should aim to be better for nature/society than no building at all, as well as increase nature beyond native conditions. A rule of reason would be applied as to whether the baseline is pre-industrial or pre-historic, depending on the location and circumstances.
Net positive sustainability According to PD, the original precepts of sustainability (nature preservation and equity among current/future generations)These principles are common to most early definitions of sustainability and were endorsed at a national level as early as 1969 in the preamble to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the United States. Among the first international documents to define sustainability was the IUCN/UNEP/WWF (1980) World Conservation Strategy, re-published in 1991 as Caring for the Earth: A Strategy for Sustainable Living, The World Conservation Union, United Nations Environment Program and World Wide Fund for Nature, Earthscan, London, UK. Here it meant improving life quality within the earth's ecological carrying capacity. See also COAG (1992) The National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (NSESD), Council of Australian Governments, Canberra, Australia. For historical context, see Commoner, B. (1971) The Closing Circle: Nature, Man And Technology, Knopf, New York and Porritt, J. (1985) Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explained, Blackwell Publishers, UK. require increasing future options.Social options do not mean more consumer products but rather substantive and positive life choices which requires increasing the ecological base and public estate. This, in turn, requires that development increase the social and natural life support systems.The idea that sustainability requires maintaining or increasing future option was discussed in Birkeland, J. (1993) Planning for a Sustainable Society: Institutional Reform and Social Transformation, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania. See also Norton, B.G. (2005) Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois for a comprehensive discussion on this point. Green design always aimed for ecological restoration, social regeneration and economic revitalization.For a typology of green building design, see Birkeland, J. (2013) 'Business Opportunities through Positive Development', in A New Dynamic: Effective Business in a Circular Economy, in K. Webster, J. Bleriot, and C. Johnston (Eds), Ellen MacArthur Foundation Publishing, Isle of Wight, UK, pp. 87-110. However, these essentially only 'add value' relative to current sites, buildings or practices.For a discussion of contemporary sustainable building design approaches, see Hes, D. and du Plessus, D. (2015) Designing for Hope: Pathways to Regenerative Sustainability, Taylor & Francis, New York. USA. Green buildings are generally assessed as 'sustainable' if they improve upon best practices. They do not yet aim to increase nature, environmental security or justice in absolute (global) terms. Positive Development, in contrast, is defined as structures that increase universal life quality and future options by expanding the 'ecological base' (ecosystems, ecological carrying capacity, biodiversity) and the 'public estate' (universal access to means of survival/well-being and social capital).Birkeland, J. (2007) 'GEN 4: 'Positive Development', BEDP (Built Environment Design Professions) Environmental Design Guide of the Australian Institute of Architects, ACT, Australia. https://www.environmentdesignguide.com.au/ Assessed June 2008. Sustainable design does not yet aim to increase overall natural and social life support systems and generally limits its focus to the health and environmental quality within the project's system boundaries. The mainstream perspective is probably because it is assumed that this is not possible. To address this, a PD website provides examples of how the built environment can address 30 crucial sustainability issues.
Terminology The term net positive is increasingly used by green designers,The term also appears as 'net-positive' or 'netpositive'. A special issue was dedicated to net-positive design. See Cole, R. (2015) 'Net-zero and Net-positive Design: a question of value', in Building Research & Information 43(1), pp. 1-6. developers and businesses.For example, see Forum for the Future, WWF, and The Climate Group (2015) Net Positive: A New Way of Doing Business. Available at http://www.theclimategroup.org/what-we-do/publications/net-positive-a-new-way-of-doing-business/ Accessed June 2015. However, they often apply it from a different perspective: 'giving back more good than bad'. That is, relative to current conditions, not to sustainability.Benchmarks are relative to the present, so eco-restoration is seen by some as net positive, yet this does not account for past biodiversity losses and increased human consumption. In effect, this mean optimizing material resources, energy and stakeholder benefits, etc., or efficiency, not an overall (global) gain. This 'reductionist' approach was the aim of 20th-century green building design.There are a wide range of 20th Century green design books, including: Papanek, V. (1971) Design for the Real World: human ecology and social change, Pantheon Books, New York; Johnson, R. (1979) The Green City, MacMillan: S. Melbourne, Australia; Todd, N. and J. Todd (1994) From Eco-Cities to Living Machines, N. Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA.; Vale, B. and R. Vale (1975) The Autonomous House: Design and Planning for self-sufficiency, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London; Wann, D. (1996) Deep Design: Pathways to a Liveable Future, Island Press, Washington, DC.; Lyle, J.T. (1994) Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development, Wiley & Sons, New York; van der Ryn, S, and Cowan, D. (1996) Ecological Design, Island Press, Washington, DC. Mackenzie, D. (1991), Green Design: Design for the Environment, Lawrence King, London; Girardet, H. (1992), The Gaia Atlas of Cities: New Directions for Sustainable Urban Living, Gaia books Ltd, London; and Yeang, K. (1999) The Green Skyscraper: The Basis for Designing Sustainable Intensive Buildings, Prestel Verlag, Munich, Germany [Yeang has written numerous books on green design]. PD emphasized the need for development to be net nature positive, since nature had been largely ignored in sustainable or regenerative design until recently.
A key feature that distinguishes the term net positive in PD from misinterpretations of the original usage is that PD separates nature restoration from nature net positive. This is because reductions in negative impacts are not net gains. Calling buildings net positive if they have more positive than negative impacts is a basic misunderstanding of PD accounting. Often, in conventional building assessment, reductions in negative impacts are sometimes called 'positive', many kinds of negative impacts are omitted, and negative impacts as judged to be somehow erased by adding positive impacts. The word 'net' in sustainability assessment necessarily means net in a whole-system sense. In PD, 'net' means public benefits beyond neutral impacts - not just reductions in the total negative impacts to zero by, for example, counting offsets or making tradeoffs.For an overview of zero-energy building, see Kibert, C.J. and Fard, M.M. (2012) Differentiating among Low-energy, Low-carbon and Net Zero-energy Building Strategies for Policy Formulation, Building Research & Information, 40(5), pp. 625-637.
Theory origins PD theory built on eco-philosophies that emerged in the 1980s.See for example, Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution, HarperCollins, New York; Warren, K. (1997), Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana; Naess, A. (1989) Ecology, community, and lifestyle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, UK; Warren, K. and Wells-Howe, B. (1994) Ecological Feminism, Routledge, New York; Salleh, A. (1997) Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern, Zed Books, London; Shiva, V. (1988) Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Zed Books, London. Calling for social transformation, they deconstructed the hierarchical cultures, dualistic thought patterns and linear-reductionist analyses of modernity. PD added a positive/negative overlay to explain why these theories did not contemplate increasing nature to offset consumption. Later, sustainability was absorbed into the dominant paradigm (DP) which assumed that current institutions could resolve the problems they fostered.See WCED (1987) Our Common Future, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. This seminal report couched sustainability within the dominant economic and policy making frameworks and did not engage with the sustainability literature critical of the dominant paradigm. According to PD, existing institutional and physical structures reduce future options and are thus terminal.Planning for Sustainability, Ibid. Birkeland, J. (2008) Positive Development, Ibid. The hypothesis was that, by converting negative systems into positive ones, genuinely sustainable planning, decision and design frameworks would materialize.
Design-decision distinction The distinction between decision-making and design is central to PD. Decision-making processes/tools divide, compare and choose. They use bounded or 'closed system' thinking which excludes considerations that are difficult to quantify. Essentially, decision methods simplify issues and options to facilitate finding the best path from the present position or desired future. Back-casting and scenario planning, while powerful tools, presume the future can be predicted and selected.Positive Development, Ibid, pp. 165-179 Such methods decide now how future citizens must live. They also reduce future options by narrowing resources, adaptability, space and biodiversity over time.
Decision-making