Common Sustainability Language

Nurturing Supportive Stable Contributing Responsive Directed Adaptive NZ2100

The Creative Decisions Common Sustainability Language is a vocabulary of seven terms that, when applied in social, economic, environmental and cultural contexts, provides a framework for a comprehensive assessment of business, environmental and community health. It forms the basis for a new approach to creating healthy and successful cities, regions, neighbourhoods, businesses, industries, NGOs, government agencies, natural ecosystems, schools, and other managed "ecosystems" that can be defined geographically, socially, economically, or culturally.

Managed ecosystems are simply collections of living organisms, including people, and the local environment on which they depend. According to KiwiGrow™ and NZ2100, healthy, successful ecosystems must be nurturing, supportive, stable, contributing, responsive, directed and adaptive. NZ2100 provides basic definitions for these terms. Services available from Creative Decisions include helping clients to expand these definitions further for their own social, economic, environmental and cultural contexts, as an essential step towards developing a strategic vision and goals that consider endpoints and processes to achieve them. The resulting framework of 28 locally-relevant concepts can provide the basis for formal reporting on the "quadruple bottom line".

Origins of the Common Sustainability Language

The Creative Decisions Sustainability Language is based on international research into ecosystem health. Creative Decisions has developed a unique and powerful extension of this research into the area of human-dominated ecosystems. The traditional ecosystem approach to sustainable development is concerned with maximising benefits from healthy natural ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, natural grasslands, stream margins, soils, and so on.

However, although the traditional ecosystem approach is holistic and recognises the presence of people in ecosystems, the concern for natural processes is paramount. Consequently, when people have described or measured ecosystem health in the past, they have based this on terms that are less applicable to systems, such as cities, businesses, or neighbourhoods, that are dominated by human presence and activities.

The Creative Decisions Common Sustainability Language was designed to be universally applicable, regardless of levels of human activity. Most importantly, it had to apply irrespective of whether we viewed (say) a city as an economic system, a social system, a cultural system, or an ecological-environmental system. It also had to relate strongly to healthy behaviour, and to be useful in communicating risk: unhealthy neighbourhoods, businesses, and so on, are associated with risks, or potential loss.

Creative Decisions developed the Common Sustainability Language after analysing how agroecologists have described and measured the health of farms and other agricultural systems. This work provided clues to how we should talk about health of systems which involve people. The original motivation for this work was the need for a strategic framework for assessing how infrastructure for water and sanitary services affected wellbeing within Waitakere City, in New Zealand.

Key concepts in NZ2100

Each of the seven terms or "system qualities", at the heart of the Creative Decisions Commonn Sustainability Language, has a general definition that suggests how it can be applied in social, economic, environmental, and cultural contexts. We mean "cultural" in the broadest sense of the word.

Think about these definitions, and you will see that they are capable of capturing every aspect of the health of human-dominated and natural systems. Try thinking about a business or a forest, for example.

System quality	Underlying themes
Nurturing	Regenerating, safe, caring
Supportive	Respectful of roles of components, non-inhibiting, fulfilling, maximising potential, equitable
Stable	Strong, not fragile, continuing, protective, respectful / honouring of traditions, not capricious
Contributing	Providing goods and services, not wasteful or draining, or a source of harmful constituents or activities
Responsive	Reactive and resourceful, having a strong capital base
Directed	Energetic, inspired, motivated, self-sustaining, confident, purposeful, self-organising
Adaptive	Resilient to change, accommodates change, innovative