WWF, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, was founded in 1961 as a nature preservation organization: it raised money from charitable donations to protect nature and natural areas. It's work is supported by the Living Planet Index, which includes ecofootprinting as a measure of impact: both of which will feature as tools in future analysis. Gradually it has expanded its focus to include incrementally deeper causes, and solutions, of nature impact, including resource conservation and climate change,...

Bioregionalism is one of many thought-products from the modern birth-period of environmentalism, the 1970s. The basic idea is simple, but you can arrive at it from many directions, and direct it to different ends. Essentially, bioregionalism is a call to situate human activities in their natural environmental contexts. This is not quite the same as matching society to an ecosystem because the bioregion includes geographic features, such as watersheds, and cultural dimensions, such as ethnic...

Economics is a strange profession where much of what is proposed is apparently social or at least contextual construct (such as profit or utility maximisation), some is a rule of thumb with a lot of exceptions and question marks (such as market efficiency) and some is a kind of science that seems universally true but is left unexamined in formal terms. One of these latter features is economy of scale . Economy of scale is understood in as the principle that, as economic production of a good...

Economics is the dirty sweaty gladiatorial arena at the centre of all sustainability debates. No matter how ethical, creative, political, practical, visionary you want to be about environmental issues, you will end up being sucked into the vortex of issues, ideas and critiques about how the economy generates, or reduces, resource consumption and nature damage. The main event in this terrain is the fight over economic growth. There are broader debates over the foundational science and political...

Accelerating good practice by benchmarking best practice. Of all the challenges facing modern cities and towns, the one that represents perhaps the largest ... opportunity, is probably housing. Housing shortages, housing quality, the impact of housing and construction, volatility of house prices, and more, are all priorities in their own right, of course. But the potential for solutions in housing, at any meaningful scale, to also contribute to solution-finding in multiple other areas of...

Welcome to Resource Vision notes. This is a way for me, John Manoochehri, and colleagues, share analysis, explainers and notes on important issues for sustainability, together with designs and tools - and support conversations and collaborations around them. When planning a cosplay look, it is worth considering how details related to cosplay costume sets will affect the complete look. When the final look will be photographed, it helps to assess details related to festival costumes together...

I am fascinated and a bit obsessed by analytical tools. I believe they are extremely useful, not just in use, but in making them and making them better, so the newsletter and archive will include a gradually growing library of tools for use by subscribers and collaborators. Some of them will be tools Resource Vision has created or contributed to, and others will useful and often universal tools, that will help understand and implement sustainability. By tools I mean broadly any analytical...

[This is stub: more information and hi-res images to be added.] Resource Vision was part of the invited competition stage, in a team led by BIG, to redesign the entire city of Kiruna, inside the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden. The design brief involved moving the city a kilometer to the East, due to subsidence of the land below the legacy village, as a result of the iron mine. Requirements included moving some entire heritage buildings, and lots of design innovation around lifestyles and...

In the next newsletter, we'll review the state of environmental building certification. For now, let's explain the basics of the most advanced one available: the Living Building Challenge of the International Living Future Institute. The LBC is based on seven categories - called Petals - of design orientation: Place Water Energy Health + Happiness Materials Equity Beauty These Petals are further divided into Imperatives group together the specific actions that will shape the sustainability of...

There's a lot of enthusiasm about wood buildings, partly because it's seen as some as a new or and others as an old or classic construction material, and mainly because people believe there is a sustainability benefit. This is a quick explainer of the pros and cons. What people mean in the built sector by 'wood building', at the moment, is not particularly buildings with wooden facades and surfaces, but buildings with wood structure . To this extent, we are talking about 'mass timber' not wood...

[This is stub: more information and hi-res images to be added.] Resource Vision was part of the invited competition stage, in a team led by BIG and Strategisk Arkitektur, to move the largest public administration office building in Sweden. The design won second prize. The design brief was to use the new office building as a the driver of regeneration of an area that was to be converted from use as a football stadium, and otherwise underdeveloped as a urban area. Resource Vision proposed using...

There's a huge media focus and public debate on Greta Thunberg. Not surprising, for me, because she is an extraordinarily articulate interpreter of the environmental challenge. And she is both highly impassioned and very funny. But what is the correct response, at least for those sympathetic to her message - that not enough is being done by politicians about climate and environmental issues? You lookin' at me? I have experienced quiet unease among some people who agree in principle that more...

This is the third of three essays discussing the state of sustainability. SUSTAINABILITY THEN - The Standard Model SUSTAINABILITY NOW - The Leverage Turn SUSTAINABILITY NEXT - Context, Texture, Meaning Finance, cities, design, tech, have separately and together have gathered huge potential to leverage change–at a time when standard actors and actions lack, even with the best will, the capacity to force the change required. But: what about the issues of the standard model–resource management...

This is the first of three essays discussing the state of sustainability. SUSTAINABILITY THEN - The Standard Model SUSTAINABILITY NOW - The Leverage Turn SUSTAINABILITY NEXT - Context, Texture, Meaning 1 WHAT IS THE STANDARD MODEL? The modern history of the sustainability movement has a specific starting point - that almost no-one knows about. After the Second World War, in 1949, an event called the United Nations Scientific Conference on the Conversation and Use of Resources took place in New...

This is the second of three essays discussing the state of sustainability. SUSTAINABILITY THEN - The Standard Model SUSTAINABILITY NOW - The Leverage Turn SUSTAINABILITY NEXT - Context, Texture, Meaning Reviewing the standard model of sustainability change is important to understand progress and the lack of it– and as a scaffold for discussion. But the model itself needs correction. We need to ask: despite all the efforts to solve sustainability and climate in the standard model, why has more...

THE HABITATION PROJECT It seems unbelievable, but the first project of the human species beyond animal survival is somehow still the most pressing challenge of the current age: finding somewhere viable to live. This essay is a reflection on what the parts of the modern habitation project actually are - housing, cities, economics, and conservation - and how they might evolve together. Housing Housing itself is somehow in short supply, everywhere in the world. And if in ‘somewhere viable to...