2.Best Practices

Best Approach Practice (BAP) No. 1:  Change the sustainability approach quickly enough for success using performance imperatives, continuous innovation, a strategic approach, and whole systems engineering.

Use each decision and action to advance regenerative systems' sustainability performance. Those decisions and investments are those of policy, planning, program development, product, service design, production, maintenance, repair, and replacement. Each decision and investment should close the systems performance gap between current and needed regenerative systems sustainability performance with the best performance available at the time followed by programs of continued research, development, and innovation to completely close the gap. 

BAP No. 1.1:  Use regenerative systems sustainability performance imperatives and continuous innovation.

Instead of using traditional planning goals that cannot generate sustainability systems performance, replace them with the performance imperatives required to produce regenerative systems sustainability. These imperatives become the north stars for navigating to regenerative systems sustainability success (see Figure 2, above). In turn, doing so allows humanity to reclaim life support system security for human and ecological systems. 

If an initiative (decision, regulation, policy, plan, design, product, or service) cannot achieve the imperatives, the imperatives become aspirational goals to advance performance as much as possible with the current initiative. Subsequently they are used to inform innovation through R&D programs to make as much additional progress as possible at the next points of repair, maintenance, and replacement. For large performance gaps, the imperatives become the basis for designing and pursuing research and development programs to formulate the innovation needed for actors to achieve them as quickly as possible. This may require new “practice” partnerships between practitioners, clients, and research institutes. 

The primary regenerative systems sustainability performance imperatives are shown in Figure 2, above, and are described as follows. They become the basis for key performance indicators (KPIs) used for navigating to systems sustainability. Such navigation requires two points of information: (1) what is the current static gap between existing conditions and the performance imperative; (2) what is the dynamic gap over time, i.e., how long it will take (in years) to bridge the gap and achieve the performance imperative. 

• Energy. One hundred percent renewable energy (solar and wind principally).

• Food. One hundred percent organic food production and animal husbandry.

• Waste. Zero waste and zero pollution by using natural systems biological loop or a closed technical human loop if the natural systems cannot be used, and continuous materials reuse (see No. 4).

• Materials. One-hundred percent continuous materials cycling in production by redesigning economic materials and production-consumption-end-of-life processes for deconstruction and ongoing reuse in re-production.

• Nature. No net destruction of nature (natural capital and services) only restoration, reinvestment, enhancement, and increase in natural system productivity and diversity (becoming a partner in evolution instead of a destroyer).

• Restoration. Restoration of damaged nature and enhancement of natural processes and productivity.

• Decision Basis. Use of full-cost decision analysis to internalize all the important external benefits and costs for decisions that lead to the best options based on real economic resource value. When the current best option cannot be chosen for financial considerations in the world of nominal prices, then choose the best possible option.  Advocate for a program to correct the externality that could not be corrected for the current decision. Use the most likely BAU future baseline instead of the static no-change scenario for the comparison case. 

In summary, using these regenerative systems' performance imperatives in the myriad of production, maintenance, and replacement decisions throughout the economic path to a regenerative, renewable energy, circular, ecological economy of sustainability success. It is not necessary to achieve these imperatives in any one project, plan, policy, product, or moment. Instead, they are used to understand the necessary direction and to achieve as much needed performance as possible in the present action and to inform subsequent innovation needed to achieve systems sustainability as soon as possible. 

BAP No. 1.2:  Take a strategic approach.

Using the performance imperatives maximizes sustainability progress and value creation for any decision, action, or sphere of responsibility. To do so, one uses the imperatives to create an informal or formal strategic approach or plan to accomplish a particular decision, action, or sphere of responsibility. It begins with an assessment of the existing conditions against the imperatives to reveal the current state of sustainability the performance gap to bridge that is required to achieve sustainability, and then to guide innovation to the best solution possible now and to inform subsequent innovation to close the gap. The activity or focus can be any of the practices that guide or create impacts in the world: a real estate development project, site plan, or land subdivision proposal; a master plan or area plan; a comprehensive or general plan (urban and regional); the design and production of goods and services; or development of policies, regulations, and laws. 

Ideally, there would be an integrated set of strategic and policy plans and programs from the national to local levels that guide the development of the built environment – particularly those aspects that cross scales -- along with the activity of the aspatial domain of the economy’s sectors. The idea is not to prescribe specific actions, but to identify and erect the guardrails that will prevent the destruction of nature and to illuminate the principles useful for designing the built environment, products, and services whose performance effects will be within regenerative systems sustainability boundaries. 

Of course, regenerative systems sustainability will not be achieved instantly. However, each use of the approach will illuminate existing barriers to ultimate success. Identifying those barriers and creating appropriate initiatives to address them is part of the new practice and the way any one initiative can sow the seeds needed for ultimate success. 

Using the regenerative systems sustainability performance imperatives in every decision and action to maximize progress towards them is the way to work on the individual parts and individual silos in a way that generates regenerative systems sustainability integration across sectors, scales, etc. It also does so in a bottom-up, self-organizing way, not top-down. This approach produces whole systems sustainability. Adopting them for our human systems and using them to innovate regenerative systems sustainability performance is the path to reclaiming and producing life support system security for human and ecological systems. 

This latter point (use of systems performance imperatives being an effective way of working on parts that also contribute to systems sustainability) can be seen loosely in the following three approaches, which are components of regenerative systems sustainability:  (1) the Cradle-to-Cradle approach of McDonough & Braungart, (2) the strategic sustainability of The Natural Step, and (3) the sustainability strategy of the Natural Capitalism approach. 

First, the “Cradle to Cradle” approach pioneered by William McDonough and Michael Braungart: 

Cradle-to-cradle design [also referred to as 2CC2, C2C, cradle 2 cradle, or regenerative design] is a biomimetic approach to the design of products and systems that models human industry on nature's processes, where materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms . . . . 

C2C suggests that industry must protect and enrich ecosystems and nature's biological metabolism while also maintaining a safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of organic and technical nutrients.[1] It is a holistic, economic, industrial, and social framework that seeks to create systems that are not only efficient but also essentially waste-free.[2] Building off the whole systems approach of John T. Lyle's regenerative design, the [C2C]  model in its broadest sense is not limited to industrial design and manufacturing; it can be applied to many aspects of human civilization such as urban environments, buildings, economics, and social systems [emphasis added].

Subsequently, McDonough & Braungart extended the C2C approach in their book entitled, “Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability – Designing for Abundance,” which illuminates the larger promise and potential of a regenerative design approach. This work, along with other aspects of a regenerative systems sustainability approach is used in Best Approach Practice 2, below. 

Second, The Natural Step developed the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) and an implementation methodology that they have used with organizations, private and public, around the world since 1990. 

“Our approach is collectively called the “Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development” – it is a comprehensive model for planning in complex systems. It is openly published and free for all to use. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development has helped hundreds of different organizations around the world integrate sustainable development into their strategic planning and create long-lasting transformative change. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development is based on systems thinking; recognizing that what happens in one part of a system affects every other part. . . . The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development gives an organization the tools to look at the whole team, understand the rules of the game, define success, and move towards it together.”

“Any successful team must have a common language and understanding in order to facilitate cooperation. The Framework provides this shared mental model of sustainability by helping people across organizations, disciplines, and cultures to communicate effectively, build consensus, and ultimately move toward their vision. We use an upstream approach that anticipates and avoids problems before they occur, rather than reacting to their downstream effects.”

This scientifically rigorous Framework gives organizations the tools to perform a gap analysis using the lens of sustainability, and then work toward closing the gap. Third, are the four principles of a natural capitalism approach and strategy that is powerful enough to transform business as follows:

Natural capitalism is a system of four interlinking principles, where business and environmental interests overlap, and in which businesses can better satisfy their customers' needs, increase profits, and help solve environmental problems all at the same time. It is an economic system that incentivizes profit based on proper care of the environment and assigns an economic value to stewardship of the planet. For example, income from natural capital includes yield from trees and plants in their natural state, not just from their extraction state.

Natural capitalism is characterized as “a new business model that enables companies to fully realize these opportunities [of a natural capitalism approach]. The journey to natural capitalism involves four major shifts in business practices, all vitally interlinked.” They constitute the Natural Capitalism strategy for sustainability. 

1. Radically increase the productivity of natural resources. Through fundamental changes in both production design and technology, farsighted companies are developing ways to make natural resources — energy, minerals, water, forests — stretch five, ten, even one hundred times further than they do today. The resulting savings in operational costs, capital investment, and time can help natural capitalists implement the other three principles.

2. Shift to biologically inspired production models and materials. Natural capitalism seeks not merely to reduce waste but to eliminate the very concept of waste. In closed-loop production systems, modeled on nature's designs, every output either is returned harmlessly to the ecosystem as a nutrient, like compost or becomes an input for another manufacturing process. Industrial processes that emulate the benign chemistry of nature reduce dependence on nonrenewable inputs, make possible often phenomenally more efficient production, and can result in elegantly simple products that rival anything [hu]man-made.

3. Move to a “Service-and-Flow” business model. The business model of traditional manufacturing rests on the sale of goods. In the new model, value is instead delivered as a continuous flow of services—such as providing illumination rather than selling light bulbs. This aligns the interests of providers and customers in ways that reward them for resource productivity.

4. Reinvest in natural capital. Capital begets more capital; a company that depletes its own capital is eroding the basis of its future prosperity. Pressures on businesses to restore, sustain, and expand natural capital are mounting as human needs expand, the costs of deteriorating ecosystems rise, and the environmental awareness of consumers increases. Fortunately, these pressures all create business opportunities.

In summary, a strategic approach involves using the systems sustainability performance imperatives of BAP No. 1.1 to understand the gap between existing conditions and systems sustainability, to manage the creative exploration of design options, and choose the option that closes as much of the gap as possible in any given decision or action. Subsequently, one would advocate for research and development to address how to close the gap completely and then would use that option at the next decision or action point. 

BAP No. 1.3:  Use whole-system engineering to get much more for much less.

“Traditional design methodology is taught as a compromise – choosing the least unsatisfactory option. However, nature has been a successful design laboratory for 3.8 billion years, and its design methodology is system optimization. “The greater degree to which the components of a system are optimized together, the more the trade-offs and compromises that seem inevitable at the individual component level become unnecessary.” Therefore, when designing a solution, “Instead of running up the decreasing marginal return curve using the same technology, invent a different technology based on optimizing across the system of which the component is a part.” 

An example from Natural Capitalism: In 1997, Interface Corporation cut the pumping power costs of its industrial processes by 92 percent. It did so by “not having a new idea,” but by “not continuing to use an old idea.“ The old idea was to optimize only part of the pumping system – the pipes – against only one parameter – pumping energy. . . . The new idea involved optimizing “the whole system for multiple benefits – pumping energy expended plus the capital costs saved.” “Such whole-system life-cycle costing, in which all benefits are properly considered over the long run is widely accepted in principle, but almost always ignored in practice. . . . Optimizing components in isolation tends to pessimize the whole system – and hence the bottom line. You can actually make a system less efficient while making each of its parts more efficient.” The lead engineer “marveled at how he and his colleagues could have overlooked such simple opportunities for decades.”

In summary, often, the domain of sustainability solutions is not found using existing methodologies or simply paying a higher price, but in shifting to a different methodology based on different presuppositions and principles. In the example, optimizing for the whole system life cycle instead of one component (pipes) on one parameter (pumping energy).  Thus, “breakthrough” solutions are often conceptual (mental) in the first place, and technology in the second place. 

Best Approach Practice No. 2:  Use Regenerative Urbanism to create a regenerative built environment of the abundant regenerative sustainability economy and regenerative city (and region).

As illustrated in Best Approach Practice No. 1, above, the imperatives can be used ad-hoc for any given investment or design decision that needs to be made outside of a systematic planning system and process. However, planners can also use them more powerfully inside a systematic strategic comprehensive planning process designed to navigate to urban and regional sustainability. The many existing intra-system barriers at other levels and domains of the system that present themselves at the project or product level as immovable can now simply become points of attention in overall regenerative system design and development planning. The advantage of this approach is similar to the whole-systems optimization approach compared to the compromise approach described in Best Approach Practice No. 1.3, above. Ideally, practitioners would use both approaches – ad-hoc AND systematic application. 

BAP No. 2.1:  Begin shifting to a regenerative approach immediately by using existing resources, budgets, expertise, and future returns to fund the regenerative option of current actions.

One frequently mentioned barrier to sustainability is that it costs more and or there are no extra funds in the budget to undertake sustainability. However, one can begin with existing resources simply by making different decisions on technology, policy, etc. using funding that is already allocated for existing maintenance, repair, and replacement or new planning initiatives: choose regenerative options instead of continuing to use existing degenerative options. 

However, to choose the regenerative options, one needs to know and understand them. To begin, planners can use existing green planning best technical practices. They are well known, have a successful history of use, and are well suited for use. Additionally, leading planning and design firms and non-governmental sustainability organizations are overflowing with existing green and leading-edge regenerative sustainability knowledge, practice, and applications. The quickest approach is to simply review their websites and talk to them, if not bring them under contract for solutions as well as for training staff and decision makers. Additionally, as a decision maker, senior manager, and planner-designer-analyst, one can begin educating oneself on the topic using all the standard sources (internet, training organizations or programs, other practitioners, beginning with the footnotes and bibliography of this section).

The shift to sustainability practices, for instance, nature-based solutions, are often less expensive, and therefore competitive, against current practices even with the systemic undervaluation of traditional practices using current prices because of externalities. In some cases, current practices generate new revenue. Regardless, sustainability solutions are all less expensive than current practices arising from externalities after accounting for full costs and benefits. Thus, they are the best decision and right move; they can be addressed by taxing present practices subsidizing desired practices, or simply by phasing out the use of current practices and phasing in new practices with sunset and sunrise policies and laws, respectively. Facing the true prices reflecting real economic costs, the market will “price in” the phase-out and shift to sustainability practices on its own accord. It will also innovate to them if current performance needs to be enhanced. 

In summary, it is possible to begin immediately, using current resources simply by switching the maintenance, repair, or replacement choice from degenerative to regenerative options. There is no need to wait for the market, which is incorrectly priced against the sustainability practices and will be late to change. It is time to correct the market failure, to make the market, and in this way do well and do good. 

BAP No. 2.2:  Reinvent the Comprehensive Plan as a strategic regenerative city plan and process to create the regenerative built environment and prepare one.

The primary role of urban planning and planners in formulating the policies, regulations, and rules for designing and building high-performance regenerative settlements, places, built environments, and infrastructure: eco-districts, eco-cities, and eco-regions. Planning’s traditional comprehensive plan, process, and implementation program is one powerful vehicle for this role and task. It is especially important because many of the existing policies, regulations, and rules for planning our buildings and settlements at any scale do not address or specify the critical aspects that determine urban systems' sustainability. In many cases, they allow a practice that creates unsustainability and lock it in for the long, lumpy, hard-and-costly-to-change 50-100+ years over which the built environment and urban infrastructure will persist. 

Ideally, especially for a national and urban reconstruction effort, one would convene a steering and advisory committee of experts spanning all the subject areas including that of a regenerative systems sustainability approach. One would staff that advisory body sufficiently with a planning team at each relevant level of the system to undertake the comprehensive plan assessment and development required to identify the challenges and opportunities and coordinate the decisions to create a state-of-the-art green urban form, i.e., regenerative built environment and economy.

Thus, one powerful vehicle for implementing regenerative systems sustainability is leveraging existing land use and planning law, and one of its primary tools, the comprehensive (or general) plan. If the legal basis for planning does not yet exist in a community or is evolving, use the comprehensive plan as a model, as a template, for innovation, and use it to show how land use planning law can and should be extended for the needs of regenerative systems sustainability success. It will focus traditionally on the city or the region but will also address the multiple scales and their interrelationships required for regenerative systems sustainability success:  parcel, block, neighborhood/district, city, region, mega-region, state/nation/global. It will also reference coordination with other initiatives beyond the formal domain of land use planning, across other economic and practice sectors, as needed, to produce regenerative systems sustainability. 

Because land use law makes the comprehensive (land use) plan the “local” land use constitution, and because it is situated well within the governing hierarchy and holds the spatial location of the local economy, the comprehensive plan can be a powerful lever (policy, regulatory, and programmatic) for regenerative systems sustainability planning and implementation. In the US, for example, It is especially true in California planning law governing the municipal General Plan and for other states with similar practices. For instance,

In California, USA, comprehensive plans are known as ‘‘general plans.” By state law, every city and county must adopt its own general plan for long-term physical development. The plan must cover a local government’s entire planning area. At a minimum, a planning area includes all land subject to the local government’s jurisdiction and “any land [outside the city’s or county’s] boundaries which in the planning agency’s judgment bears relation to its planning.” (California Government Code Section 65300). The general plan is extremely important because all city and county land use decisions must be consistent with the general plan. It has been described by California courts as being “a constitution for all future developments.”

The California General Plan’s mission casts a wide net and long trajectory over which the General Plan can guide activity, particularly the phrase in the quote above: “. . . being ‘a constitution for all future developments.’” As such, one can envision using the regenerative systems sustainability imperatives as the kernel of the plan’s long-term vision. Planners would use them to develop a strategic general plan to create the regenerative built environment itself, and as a foundational part of -- and spur to – the ongoing transformation of the local regenerative ecological economy as quickly as possible, which is the basis for urban systems sustainability. 

The American Planning Association’s PAS Report No. 578, Sustaining Places:  Best Practices for Comprehensive Plans, proposes to reinvent the comprehensive plan to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The author’s description of the rationale and anticipated forces that will shape places in the 21st century and the challenges they pose to shape good places is instructive (see the text box, below, The Future of Comprehensive Planning Practice). It underlines the points made above regarding the power of the comprehensive plan and some of the key trends. 

Canada provides another example of comprehensive planning for sustainability. The federal government required municipalities to prepare and implement Integrated Community Sustainability Plans (ICSPs) to receive federal gas tax revenue.

An ICSP is as much a process as it is a plan. The result is more than a document: it is an ongoing process of engaging stakeholders in the community in co-creating a vision of a sustainable future and linking that to realistic planning and collaborative action today. ICSPs emphasize long-term thinking, collaboration between departments and between sectors, engaging community stakeholders, creating partnerships, and continuous monitoring and evaluation.

In addition, the exercise would clearly identify a wide range of barriers requiring attention that would be missed otherwise. The Regenerative Systems Sustainability General Plan’s performance imperatives, policies, objectives, and actions would formulate, describe, and specify the collaborative, multi-stakeholder process to resolve these barriers. In so doing, it would simultaneously become the governing vehicle for working towards success and in the process, constitute a new governance mode needed for the new, wide-ranging, long-term creative effort required for sustainability success. Thus, the comprehensive plan reformulated as a regenerative systems sustainability general plan would be entirely consistent with the existing intent and legal parameters of general plan law, but it would likely look different and substantially change the scope of general or comprehensive planning practice. 

The regenerative systems sustainability performance imperatives (BAP No. 1.1) would  be a central component of the Regenerative Systems Sustainability General (Comprehensive) Plan. They would be used to plan, design, invest, and build the built-environment, human urban and regional settlement system-economy so that it does not violate the economic principles of nature’s regenerative life support system-economy, and even enhances its functioning. As a result, the human economy becomes both more productive and abundant with a regenerative approach. 

An urban system arising from the use of regenerative systems sustainability imperatives and comprehensive planning would likely have the following core characteristics.

• Use renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, hydrologic), including maximum on-site generation and a distributed system of microgrids. Such a local system could be integrated into the existing wider area transmission grids to the degree they were needed and could be economically maintained. Ultimately, the local generation and wider area grids may be part of a global grid that spans time zones, with the light side powering the dark side of the world. This would be possible if/when issues of superconductivity could be solved. 

• Shift to a circular economy by using materials and designing products and processes for end-of-life deconstruction and reuse. 

• The economy’s materials, technology, and processes would not degrade or destroy natural processes, habitats, or species; better yet, restore and enhance them.

• Materials management and use would not overload natural sinks beyond their processing capacity nor take from natural sources beyond their regeneration rate. 

• Where use of existing nature’s biological deconstruction and reuse is not possible, create and maintain separate technological design/production/deconstruction or waste storage loops that are isolated from nature forever, and phase them out as possible over time.

• Use regenerative urban and regional systems planning of its infrastructure, buildings, and settlement patterns to embed physical nature into the city, to secure the less expensive nature-based ecosystem services and their co-benefits, and to continually innovate the best planning practices needed for full regenerative built environment systems sustainability performance. 

• Embed the principles and practices of biophilic city planning and design into the comprehensive plan and associated implementation tools of the zoning code and various development guidelines to maximize their aesthetic, individual health, and community health benefits. Use the practices of biophilic cities as a core component of all community programs as applicable. 

• Use full-cost life-cycle analysis as the basis for decisions. 

In summary, using the regenerative systems sustainability performance imperatives to create the regenerative built environment via reinventing the comprehensive planning law, plan, and process creates a critical foundation of any vehicle for local sustainability and its attendant economy. Doing so spurs additional progress towards sustainability throughout the rest of the economy, locally and systemwide.  Use the practices of biophilic cities as central components of the general (comprehensive) plan and implementing tools (zoning code, guidelines) and in all community programs as applicable.

BAP No. 2.3:  Identify and make the big, regenerative, context-reshaping moves.

San Francisco Planning Department explored this approach in a parallel planning study related to the preparation of a new area plan.   The study team formulated four “big moves,” that change the infrastructure context and systems, as follows. They may not be entirely applicable to all locations. If not, the big moves required for those locations need to be formulated.

1. Develop District Water with Heat Exchange. Develop the district water utility to manage the exchange of heat between buildings and districts in the city, as well as manage the flow and reutilization of water and nutrients. It would use the following key elements.

• Separate water sources using relatively clean surface and subsurface water to support vegetation and biophilic design for local health benefits.

• Reduce and creatively manage urban flooding with district-scale flood management infrastructure to guard against extreme weather and other events; if needed, elevate buildings and sidewalks; use a water heating/cooling system to help get to net zero energy. 

• Use hydronic heat transfer within buildings and between blocks to capture energy from local water sources and sewers; bio-digest wastewater sludge to generate biogas, electricity, and heat.

2. Develop coordinated blue-green infrastructure to improve ecological function, building performance, and community benefits (stormwater management, heat island effect, habitat, food production, air quality, and more attractive places). 

3. Connect blocks and buildings to enable and scale the circular flow and sharing of resources across the city (buildings, blocks, district+). For example:

• Balance day/night activities with mixed uses to share resources efficiently (for instance, mixed building uses where a portion of the building is daytime commercial uses and a portion is residential at night, or the mix occurs over the block). 

• At the block scale, use isochronous control via the Internet of Things to manage power and water systems to reduce energy use and carbon emissions. 

• At the occupant scale, add virtual building system controls via the telephone so occupants can optimes their thermal comfort, which leads to a reduction in energy use.

4. Develop integrative metabolic centers with circular relationships between resource recovery, water treatment, waste-to-energy, and food production systems within a single facility. Such an approach creates the potential to turn traditional utility cost streams into net revenue streams. 

A high-level cost-benefit assessment of this approach indicated that using a regenerative systems sustainability approach for area planning and development would increase the area plan’s public benefit substantially, from $3 to $5+ billion.

Renewable energy system design and development (generation, storage, transmission, on/off-site, backup, transportation, charging, etc.) would be another big, context-shaping move. The San Francisco Study did not assess and design a renewable energy system for the Central SoMa planning area, presuming that would occur at the city system and/or regional/state level, not the district level. Thus, this topic is not included in the four moves listed above. Such a move would include generation and storage (on-site and off-site), integration with the wider grid, use of microgrids, backup energy supply and protocols, and design integration with related land use and transportation components, such as highly energy-efficient buildings (up to the 90 percent reduction from passive house building technology), designing a system and specifications for public and private EV charging. The full design challenge would need to be assessed and addressed. 

In summary, identify and make the big, context-shaping moves needed for regenerative systems sustainability, such as: (1) developing district water with heat exchange; (2) developing coordinated blue-green infrastructure; (3) connecting blocks and buildings to enable and scale the circular flow and sharing of resources; (4) develop integrative metabolic centers with circular relationships between resource recovery, water treatment, waste-to-energy, and food production systems within a single facility that turns utility cost streams into net revenue streams; and design and develop renewable energy systems including generation, storage, transmission, on/off-site, backup, transportation, charging, etc.

BAP No. 2.4:  Extend the regenerative systems sustainability approach from the regenerative built environment to the rest of the city to create complete livable places.

BAP No. 2.4.1:  Extend the planning horizon to 100 years.

To fully frame the challenge and required response, extend the traditional 20-year comprehensive planning horizon to one hundred years.

BAP No. 2.4.2:  Include all the components of a regenerative city.

Include all the components of a regenerative built environment: buildings, energy, water, sewer, transportation (multi-modal, roads, parking), land use, urban design, open space, parks, recreation, nature (biodiversity and biophilia), agriculture and food system, hazards (inventory, modeling, mitigation). 

BAP No. 2.4.3:  Include visioning and development of additional performance systems imperatives for livability with engaged stakeholders.

Formulate needs based on engaged stakeholder visioning and specifying the livability performance standards of a prosperous inclusive place from which to design the systems performance imperatives of livable places. 

BAP No. 2.4.4:  Use a living community approach and patterns for regenerative neighborhood design.

These are some of the primary ideas of regenerative design methodology:

• Shift the focus from doing less bad to doing “more good.”

• Set ideal performance as the indicator of success.

• Break paradigms and create new models.

• Act as a trim tab (make little changes that in turn generate BIG effects).

• Enhance local resource (re)use.

• Enhance carrying capacity by design, by shifting from linear resource flows to regenerative/circular flows, and then continually increasing productivity.

• Use living community patterns as creative catalysts to create solutions with many co-benefits that achieve multiple regenerative design imperatives simultaneously. 

These twelve Living Community Patterns are action design strategies formulated to stimulate creativity and development of design solutions that achieve multiple living community imperatives simultaneously. 

1. Pattern 01: Urban Rewilding. Integrate wild nature into communities through architecture, urban design, and planning.

2. Pattern 02: Human-Scale Communities. Human scale is the primary criterion for design decisions in a community.

3. Pattern 03: Streets for People. Make streets primarily for small-scale human mobility and other needs.

4. Pattern 04: Blue-Green Streets. Transform some streets into a new place of biophilia, recreation, and natural systems. 

5. Pattern 05:  Street-to-Table. Integrate growing food into the everyday life of the street and community.

6. Pattern 06: Grower/Maker Spaces. Provide flexible communal places for collaborative small-scale creation and storage.

7. Pattern 07:  Roof as Resource. Use rooftops as resources for rainwater collection, open space, agriculture, habitat, solar panels, and heat reflection (cooling).

8. Pattern 08:  Mobility in the Middle. Improve mobility through streets and neighborhoods designed to accept smaller vehicles.

9. Pattern 09:  The Second Act. When buildings undergo significant retrofits, they should be rebuilt as Living Buildings.

10. Pattern 10:   Place-Based Memory. Use development projects and community initiatives to design the history of the community into the place.

11. Pattern 11:  Show & Tell. Showcase small, leading-edge demonstration projects to build momentum and catalyze more projects.

12. Pattern 12:  Footprint Analysis. Establish a baseline carrying capacity for a neighborhood by assessing its potential resource capture. 

These patterns were developed as an initial set for city planners and designers (and professionals) to use, test, revise, and extend in practice to eventually identify and add new patterns into a more complete set.

In summary, learn and use regenerative design methodology and living community patterns to develop design solutions that create regenerative neighborhood systems. 

BAP No. 2.4.5:  Formulate the Zoning Ordinance and Design Guidelines of regenerative systems urbanism—the regenerative city. 

Prepare a zoning ordinance to implement the comprehensive plan, along with design guidelines, and other support deemed useful for realizing the vision of the comprehensive plan for a regenerative built environment and city. Use biophilic city planning and design principles and practices in formulating those tools so as to maximize their aesthetic, individual health, and community health benefits. 

BAP No. 2.4.6:  Base the comprehensive plan policies and land use map and its implementing zoning ordinance on optimizing performance across the primary urban system dimensions of land use, density, and transportation. 

If land use was governed by a perfectly competitive market, the amount, type, and density of land uses and transportation capacity would be optimized to reflect the desired land use performance for access, mobility, affordable housing, and neighborhood-serving retail along with the export economy serving the region and beyond.  However, land use is not governed by a perfectly competitive market and the disconnected feedback loops generate under or over-production of land uses, density, and transportation capacity. These results in turn create insufficient or excess demand and associated undesirable conditions such as mobility congestion, delay, and excessive trip times, limited access, overcrowding, unaffordability, vacant storefronts, underperforming retail, excessive trips, etc.  

Part of the challenge is that of growth. It is hard to imagine any growth path optimizing across these dimensions. Unaffordable housing in the short term is largely caused by robust local job growth outpacing the capacity of the local housing industry to produce housing. Affordable housing located far from job centers results from land use decisions that limit density and proximity beyond required that to produce housing near job centers, and to levels of growth locally and regionally beyond that envisioned in the land use capacity produced at the time of the initial land use decisions. A more central reason for this land use disequilibrium is that the comprehensive plan has been envisioned as a 20-year growth planning exercise, presuming on-going growth and associated adjustments to zoning for increased density. The problem with this on-going growth and unplanned buildout parameters is that it undermines producing the range of capacity needed across the land use, density, and transportation dimensions to optimize performance. As a result, the least fungible components are underproduced, mostly transportation capacity, then housing, and density needed for local economic vitality and access. The result is city’s stuck with suboptimized settlement patterns that are difficult and expensive to correct, it correction is possible at all. 

The logical fallacy underlying this approach to growth planning is that physical systems cannot grow forever and part of the function of land use planning, and the comprehensive plan is defining and aiming development at a buildout land use pattern that does optimize across land use, density, and transportation for access, mobility, housing affordability, and neighborhood economic vibrancy. Doing so would require a new planning function:  build out planning and post-city, county, and regional, and state buildout growth planning and management. 

However, any individual jurisdiction can undertake the modeling and planning required to optimize land use performance at buildout and over as much of the growth path as possible, and then manage land use accordingly. Planners can use modern urban system simulation tools to undertake and forge this new planning function and task for their communities. Doing so will usher in the next generation of urban and regional systems planning, management, and practice.

BAP No. 2.4.7:  Include a fiscal impact analysis and financing plan in the Comprehensive Plan to require and fully fund the needed life-cycle maintenance, repair, and replacement of the public infrastructure and investment. 

Include a fiscal impact analysis and financing plan that covers the full life cycle of all services, equipment, and infrastructure. It should fund need in moving from the current state of deterioration and deferred maintenance to meeting the systems performance imperatives of the regenerative built environment and the larger realm of a livable city (see No. 2.2.3).

BAP No. 2.5:  Renovate and repattern the existing built environment -- not only new development.

Most sustainability planning is focused on new projects, new development. Developing the guidance to create a regenerative built environment to meet the needs of growth is important. Equally important, possibly more important, is the need to renovate the existing built environment to achieve regenerative systems sustainability performance as soon as possible. Essentially, this task involves accelerating renovation or replacement investment in the existing built environment to restore aging buildings and infrastructure and replace/install the technology and services required to achieve the performance imperatives. As with formulating the approach to new development, doing so will require the assessment of current conditions using a future baseline reflecting anticipated changes under the likely climate change scenario. Such modeling is improving, but still in an early stage of development. Therefore, the future conditions modeling exercise is less about precise point estimates, or even ranges, but orders of magnitude or simply the likely set of individual types of events and figuring out how to avoid their impacts or minimize them through redesign of the existing and future urban environment.

BAP No. 2.6:  Build resilience and community through the interactive engagement required to build the regenerative built environment and city.

During the transition to a fully regenerative systems sustainability economy, there is a fundamental need to connect the larger urban economy with disadvantaged communities in new ways, so they have access to and participate in real wealth generation and accumulation. The changed economy and urban metabolism of a regenerative built environment would meet the needs of disadvantaged communities. It would include healthy and service-rich environments focused on education and skills development. A regenerative built environment would increase new regenerative economic opportunities. It would add nature to the built environment that would expand well-being, reduce stress, produce community cohesion, and support collective action. It would eliminate existing sources of environmental pollution and injustice and, over time, remediate existing hazardous environmental conditions. 

Cooperation and community cohesion are both a requirement of regenerative urbanism and a product of it. They are key organizing concepts in politics and urban development and community planning. The goal of inclusive prosperity cannot be attained with an economy that destroys nature and our planetary life support security. Thus, correcting these economic dynamics with a shift to regenerative urbanism is the first priority, and it addresses a range of equity and social justice issues. It will expand the carrying capacity of the economy and nature to the levels of productivity required for the inclusive prosperity of 9-12 billion people by 2050-2100 with only net positive environmental impacts. One question for the equity community that arises from a regenerative systems sustainability approach is whether advocacy work should focus on campaigns to increase participation in and share of an unraveling, increasingly toxic environment and economy, or focus on advancing the use of regenerative urbanism and creation of regenerative economies and communities gaining proficiency and skills in the regenerative economy, urbanism, and planning?  If the response is the latter, then engagement in the regenerative transition will simultaneously address a range of equity and social justice issues. 

One key problem with the current economy is that it is based on the take-make-waste linear material flow of the current BAU economy that will eventually exhaust the biosphere’s raw material inputs to the human economy. At that time, it will be too late to solve the problem. Such limits are intrinsic to our current linear approach to resource use. With it, we account only for the harvest from nature and not the harvesting’s destruction of nature’s regenerative capacity (natural capital). According to the best information available, we are reaching the limits of a linear approach in this century. The effects will exclude us all, ultimately (likely later this century if trends continue). Another key problem is the ever-expanding production of toxic chemicals, their industrial use, and their accumulation in the life support processes of nature and the human economy, ultimately the human body. 

In contrast, a regenerative approach (1) mimics the self-organizing regenerative principles and processes of nature; (2) steps into the infinite loop of cycling materials in production, deconstruction, and reuse of nature’s material in subsequent rounds of production; (3) uses nontoxic materials that decompose biologically and then are reused in nature’s life support production processes; and (4) harnesses human creativity and innovation to amplify nature’s principles and processes that expand the life support (carrying) capacity for both nature and the human economy. 

The ultimate result could be a human economy that produces inclusive prosperity for all in perpetuity, while also expanding the richness of nature without damaging nature. This shift creates the foundation for perpetual inclusive prosperity, with expanding productivity being the determining factor for meeting everyone’s needs. The solution is designing for infinite material cycling in the human economy without adverse effect on nature. Doing so using the principles and practices of regenerative bio-systems-mimicry, is the only way to expand substantially the carrying capacity of the human and environmental systems to achieve inclusive prosperity. The nature economy allows for production in perpetuity through resource cycling and design for non-toxicity (health), deconstruction, and reuse. Regenerative sustainability would use these principles as planning and design imperatives for the human economy, including the built environment.

Project-level case studies show that regenerative urbanism can build community capacity for both climate change resiliency and restorative justice in disadvantaged communities.  Project goals can be aligned with community goals, such as regenerating community in historically disinvested areas. Initial work involves the project team engaging to understand stakeholder interests, formulate potential scenarios, and assess their impacts and benefits. Engagement occurs through standard planning engagement practices, such as virtual work sessions, surveys, and online public comments. The goal is typically something like creating a  diverse, inclusive, and accessible neighborhood. 

Often existing urban fabric must be rewoven to restore the land use functionality of smaller-scale streets and accessible community services distributed throughout. Sometimes the proposed project can provide the physical basis for restoring an area as a crossroads to and from the community land uses, its institutions, churches, community centers, places of work and living. As such, projects can serve as one part of a larger community effort to reestablish a neighborhood as a center of ethnic identity and culture. 

The planning team can formulate the project concept to support the ethnic community’s desire for self-determination. It can be structured so the ethnic community would build it, own it, and benefit from it in the future. Often, planners find it necessary to use a new governing entity, like the UDCK in Kashiwa (smart city partnership between community, business, university), or in the Albina Project in Portland Oregon.  In both cases, land use decision-making and development authority over all aspects of the project. With this governance entity, the community would be able to reconfigure the built environment and its economy to improve community wealth, health, and cohesion for themselves. In the Albina Project, the Black community used the governing entity to organize community cultural activities and guide stewardship in the neighborhood to reconfigure the built environment and its economy to improve community wealth, health, and cohesion.

In summary, during the transition to a fully regenerative systems sustainability economy, there is a fundamental need to connect the larger urban economy with disadvantaged communities in new ways, so they have access to and participate in real wealth generation and accumulation. In disadvantaged communities, regenerative urbanism can build community capacity that generates both climate change resiliency and restorative justice. Regenerative urbanism provides an opportunity to participate in the transition to a regenerative city and economy that affords on-going durable jobs and elimination of existing sources of environmental injustice instead of a bigger part of a shrinking and toxifying current economic pie. At the project level, a new governance entity is often developed that gives the community land use decision-making and development authority over all aspects of the project. The community uses it to reconfigure the built environment and its economy to improve community wealth, health, and cohesion for themselves.

BAP No. 2.7:  Use modern GIS and GeoDesign practices

Use modern GIS and Geodesign practices to accomplish three objectives.  First, leverage modern tools that enable systems simulation to develop and scale regenerative systems sustainability city planning. Second, advance the next generation of digital urban planning and design practice. Third, produce the enhanced processes and decisions needed for success. 

Best Approach Practice No. 3:  “Harden” socio-economic systems for the period of climate system recalibration if mitigation is successful or not.

Given the long lead times of climate system responsiveness, even successful mitigation will still produce many decades if not a century or more of increasingly severe, hostile, and inhospitable environmental conditions while the climate system recalibrates to pre-1990 climate conditions, if that is possible, or to another new—and unpredictable but certainly more  hostile “normal.” Thus, for a substantially long period into the future, human society needs to “harden” its society and economy to protect them from damage and destruction. During this recalibration period, costs will increase, production will decrease, and supply chain disruptions will increase and vary unpredictably. These effects will ripple throughout the economy over the full range of goods and services and nature’s inputs (clean air, clean water, access to water, etc.). 

Increasingly, the practice area of disaster recovery is recognizing that the normalization of extreme climate and weather events will invalidate the business model of (e.g., bankrupt) the insurance industry. One can only insure against infrequent catastrophic events, not frequent ones. As a result, new development and recovery planning must presume that insurance for extreme events will be unavailable and options developed and evaluated accordingly.

Best Approach Practice No. 4:  Restore damaged nature in the context of new nature arising from accelerating climate change and associated ecosystem changes.

Regenerative city planning best practices include restoring nature that the economy, land use, and urbanization have damaged (over the past 400 years of industrialization and 10,000 years of agriculture!). This includes reversing the accelerating biodiversity loss that has been characterized as the sixth extinction primarily through habitat restoration. “Unlike previous extinction events caused by natural phenomena, the sixth mass extinction is driven by human activity, primarily (though not limited to) the unsustainable use of land, water and energy use, and climate change.”

However, recovery and restoration must be pursued in the context of accelerating climate change and associated changes in ecosystems and local nature. Climate change may render current local nature unsupportable over time with changes in water and temperature regimes, associated changes in species, etc. Climate change may render unattainable the existing biodiversity and species protections prescribed in our laws.  Attempting to attain them will become a waste of resources and “fool's errands.” Instead, those resources should be targeted to enhance the productivity of the new nature beyond what it might do on its own. The new nature, because the change is arising from the increasing intensity of climate change over time, will consist in part of old nature, current nature as changed, and future nature under future conditions. Nature restoration and re-creation in such a dynamic context will require research on creative reimagination, and a changing program, and include at least the following types of actions and best practices.

1. Restoring the regenerative life support “natural” capital and processes of nature destroyed in the past, eliminating future damage, and enhancing nature beyond what might otherwise occur. Practices would include the following.

• Shifting to organic, or what is now referred to as regenerative agriculture and animal husbandry or agro-ecology.

• Restoring past damage as part of future development along with eliminating net new impacts from new development. This can be accomplished through the use of mitigation banks that restore, extend, or recreate fully functional extent habitat (of new nature), even in urban areas and infrastructure.

• Restoring past nature as part of the daily business of the public and private economy, with some percentage of profits earmarked for proven mitigation. 

2. Detoxifying or otherwise isolating contaminated toxic sites, such as old industrial manufacturing facilities.  (think superfund, old military bases).

3. Preventing the release into nature of all the organic and inorganic chemical compounds from production and consumption across all sectors of the economy.

4. Drawing down the accumulating presence of organic and inorganic chemical compounds in nature from past and existing industrial activity.

5. Cease using “red list” chemicals and all others where toxicity and organic decomposition or human deconstruction is uncertain or logically or practically unlikely or impossible.

In summary, nature must be restored, but doing so must be programmed for the new and ongoing changing nature emerging under accelerating climate change. Many or all of our existing “old” nature concepts of protection enshrined in law will no longer be attainable and should not be pursued further. 

Best Approach Practice No. 5:  Work across the system, as necessary.

As a particular initiative is pursued, one must plan, design, and invest across all system scales and subsystems as needed for that initiative’s success. Sustainability at one system level often depends on conditions at another system level or domain. Given the interrelated scales of the built environment, one would expect to see assessment, planning, decisions, and implementation at each scale as needed and across the different sectors (water, wastewater, stormwater, energy, land uses, etc.). Similar teams should be formed for each region and city to apply the regenerative systems sustainability performance imperatives in each setting. Such a comprehensive plan preparation effort would include functional plans for the different infrastructure systems of stormwater, etc., including agriculture and the shift to a circular economy. The approach would be the same for each scale, but the planning would vary for the different conditions of the different areas. The key is to identify the development needed at the scale of the intervention, and then also needed at other scales for that intervention to work (the International Living Future Institute calls this practice “scale jumping.”

In summary, as each initiative is pursued, one must plan, design, and invest across all system scales and subsystems as needed for that initiative’s success. Sustainability at one system level often depends on conditions at another system level or domain.

Best Approach Practice No. 6:  Plan and design for the new context of accelerating climate change, unsustainability, and new nature.

Success will require a realistic and sober understanding of a changing environmental and planning context. Planning and design can no longer unwittingly presume the continuation of the relatively benign environmental conditions of the past into the future. 

The future under climate change is one of ever-increasing destructive power, variability, and frequency of extreme weather and climate conditions. That acceleration will continue until a different, more benign context emerges from successful mitigation. Mitigation success will occur eventually over the long lead time of climate system recalibration (decades to 100+ years after eliminating GHG emissions). These changes will produce a new nature of increasingly hostile and difficult environmental conditions for human habitation, economic production, and survival over the decades through the century-plus period of climate recalibration if mitigation is successful. The implications are not simply for the physical built environment and infrastructure, but economic and social systems too involved in human well-being and survival. 

Much of the sustainability planning literature and discussion acknowledges the dramatic changes expected from the accelerating twin challenges of climate change and unsustainability, but current practices and new approaches and solutions do not address them sufficiently. Instead, approaches often presume explicitly or implicitly the continuation of the relatively benign nature of the pre-1990 climate. The planning horizon is often too short to bracket and illuminate them, as it is limited to the routine 10- or 20-year comprehensive planning period or the 30+ year useful life of infrastructure. Also, current practices likely do not even include presuming that many of these factors would even arise.

Thus, approaches and solutions need to acknowledge--if not be based on modeling to the degree possible -- the increasing variation in environmental conditions (temperature, rainfall, etc.) that will dramatically stress, change, and disrupt existing ecosystems, cities, and regions. That stress will reduce the primary productivity and resilience of ecosystems (nature). It will also increase costs, reduce production, and increase supply disruptions in the human economy. The point is that we must not only implement recommended best technical practices and extend them, but we need to innovate to the new ones needed to address the new nature and new human economic context, not the old until the climate system recalibrates around a new pattern as the result of successful mitigation.

For instance, 

• Will expanding urban forests and tree canopies intended to combat heat islands be supportable in the new nature of extreme weather events and hydrologic variability (deepening and ongoing drought conditions predicted for the western United States)? If not, they will not be a solution for extreme heat and an alternative should be addressed now. 

• How realistic is assuming an increase in mode share for pedestrian and bicycle trips as partial climate mitigation when extreme heat days will increase along with cataclysmic weather, rendering such modes health hazards – at least for part of each year? 

• Will the mechanical systems of existing cars, buses, and trains be able to operate during extreme heat days of increasingly long periods of weeks and months, or during other cataclysmic weather events (floods)? If not, and current disaster preparedness presumes they will be operational, another response needs to be developed. 

• Do we really need complete streets (part of the current approach to sustainable transportation), or do we need a complete, climate/future-proofed transportation system? 

• Designing flood, stormwater, wastewater, water treatment, building, and other infrastructure with life spans of 30-50-100+ years will need to be based on previously 100-500-1000-year events normalized now to daily, monthly, annually, every 10, 20, 50 years, with increasing frequency over time and the longer mitigation takes. In some cases, new events will arise that did not exist in old nature but will exist in new nature, some of which we will not be able to predict. Therefore, we will need the social and institutional capacity for highly intelligent and agile problem-solving in real-time (learning organizations, institutions, and global society). 

• Homes, workplaces, and cities – and even the daily rhythm of life -- must be designed to cope with months-long extreme heat from climate change, months to years of drought in some areas, along months-long poor air quality from fires as nature’s primary production can no longer be supported with the new reduced and/or highly variable water cycles. 

• Agriculture, aside from shifting to organic, agroecological methods, must be developed for and adapted to the increasingly hostile and variable environmental conditions that will cause substantial and rolling crop failure with our current methods. 

• Even if current agricultural methods were to continue without climate change, they would ultimately fail entirely as toxic soils are eroded to the point of no return, pesticide use, and saltwater intrusion renders soil and groundwater unusable (for agriculture or drinking), and groundwater is pumped past the possibility of realistic recharge. 

• How will we agilely adjust our social practices, economies, and built environment to cope with the unpredictable but likely increasing number of outbreaks of known and unknown contagions arising from ecosystem changes under a warming climate, especially when so many of our social practices involve close and frequent human proximity that will spread contagions quickly?  

In summary, regenerative built environments-economies must be designed for the real challenges climate change and unsustainability will present over the next 100+ years, including new nature. 

Best Approach Practice No. 7:  Harness the market and legal system to reverse climate change and unsustainability and accelerate the transition to an abundant regenerative ecological economy. 

Much of current climate change and unsustainability arise from existing laws, prices that do not reflect all costs, policies, subsidies, etc. These signals put the economy on the trajectory of climate change catastrophe and unsustainability. At some point, these signals will need to be changed, repealed, and replaced with measures that point the economy towards climate mitigation, sustainability, and durable economics, jobs, and prosperity. 

As substantial as these corrective changes will be, they do not need to be instantaneous or bankrupting. Policy makers can design policies to phase out old industries and transition to the new industries that society needs for a successful future. In fact, this type of innovation -- policy innovation -- is one requirement of sustainability success. The old industries and firms could become the new industries and firms with a transition of investment, etc. Doing so would be most efficient and effective if it involved responding to the right market signals. Thus, creating the new regulatory context and market system dynamic that harnesses the price system and legal system to reverse climate change and unsustainability is another key component of sustainability success. Such policy innovation will formulate new legislation, policies, and programs based on the use of full-cost accounting and the regenerative living systems imperatives that correct the market failure.   

Professionals responsible for legislation, policy, planning, strategy, and regulation of organizations (public and private) and institutions (the economy, law) must reverse many past practices to manage the economy so that it creates the expanding life support capacity of sustainability instead of the declining capacity of  unsustainability. They can do this by shifting to a regenerative systems sustainability approach -- by using the regenerative systems sustainability imperatives to create the context and market dynamic that redirects individual action and the system trajectory towards real sustainability success. This includes making current unsustainability practices illegal and making new sustainability practices legal. Anything less than this response will be false economics, value, and wealth creation. Again, these actions will not occur instantly or all at once but must be designed to orchestrate a constructive transition from unsustainability to sustainability.

Substantial innovation will be required in regulatory, policy, and planning tools to blunt the risks and costs of change during the transition. Such an approach would enable and productively engage individuals and businesses in the transition as society eliminates unsustainability and creates sustainability. Such an approach will create the needed new set of “sunset” and “sunrise” regulations, policies, and tools as the industries and practices of unsustainability disappear and those of sustainability appear. This change is not simply one of getting rid of the old unsustainable parts and adding new sustainable parts of the economy, where old participants go away, and new participants arrive. This change is a transformation of the old into the new. No one goes away. Everyone makes the transition and the transformation. However, the old unsustainable practices go away, and those old participants become the new participants of the new sustainability practices, industries, etc. 

Full-cost accounting is the basis and conceptual tool for making decisions based on the real economic  value of design, production, and investment. Other tools include legislation, economics, public policy, and strategy. Simply put, it involves identifying and estimating costs and benefits not accounted for in current nominal market prices. This differential is then integrated into market prices with taxes or subsidies designed to have no unintended effects. When taxes and subsidies will not sufficiently correct prices, then laws and regulations are required as guardrails on activity to prevent unsustainable practices and catalyze sustainable practices. The exercise does not need to be 100 percent complete, accounting for all excluded value, but must include all factors whose omitted value is large enough to change purchase decisions, and therefore production and investment decisions. Full-cost accounting internalizes the present external costs and benefits that distort the value upon which decisions are made. These distortions have led to the twin accelerating calamities of climate change and unsustainability. Decisions based on false nominal prices in the market (under counting costs, over counting benefits) are accelerating climate change and unsustainability. 

Similarly, national (GNP) and regional accounts should be revised so that they do not reflect underestimated costs or inflated benefits. For instance, in national accounting (GNP), the business activity that restores nature damaged by economic activity, e.g., cleaning up an oil spill, is now accounted for as income in the national accounts instead of as a cost to correct damage from production. 

Laws and regulations must be revised so that unsustainability is no longer legal and so that sustainability is no longer illegal. Similarly, taxes and subsidies must be revised to no longer support unsustainability and hinder sustainability. This will not happen instantly. Increasingly, the market itself will drive such changes as the false value of current industries (oil assets that will never be used) and the risks of being employed in industries or investing in firms and industries based on false prices becomes more apparent in the market. However, such changes will become more and more difficult to make, and at greater pain and loss, the longer it takes for them to manifest in the market. Thus, proactive public policy becomes a life saver and a future pain reducer, and therein lies its value. If society anticipates these changes with anticipatory corrective action, the outcomes will be less expensive, less painful, and better. 

A good example of anticipatory public policy is one tool recently developed for this very purpose, the Natural Assets Management tool developed by the Municipal Natural Assets Initiative of the Smart Prosperity Institute. In addition, past innovation developed and pilot tested the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) as an overall measure of production that does not count correcting damage as income. As a result, it shows whether society’s trajectory is towards or away from sustainability. The GPI can be used to supplement information or as an alternative to GNP and GDP. 

In summary, the bad news is that our political system designs the context of the modern economy to create climate change and unsustainability, thereby threatening life support security, human health, and perpetual prosperity. The good news is that these human practices can be reversed with new practices based on intelligence and science. In addition, reversing them is not only an imperative for a successful future, but also the best business model and path forward for business, economics, and society.

Best Approach Practice No. 8:  Continuously innovate to needed systems performance.

Although the term best planning practices suggests a simple list of techniques connected to desired outcomes, using them is not as simple as the “plug-and-play” implication. In addition, the current set of best planning practices in the eleven sections of this Ukrainian Recovery Guidelines will only take us part way to climate and sustainability success. The balance of needed best planning practices must be invented in our projects, our planning, and at the contextual level of laws, policy, strategy, and regulations. This innovation across the system, when the need is revealed by plan, project, or program implementation is one of the new best “approach” planning practices required in every public or private action for success. 

Although innovation is practiced at many points in our socioeconomic system, it is largely focused on individual micro-opportunities, not the big system-level transformations needed to reverse accelerating catastrophic climate change and unsustainability. As a result, the innovation required for regenerative systems sustainability success is either not being pursued or being pursued insufficiently. Success requires constituting, funding, and managing an additional R&D innovation program beyond the micro level focused specifically on a prioritized agenda of advances and breakthroughs needed for regenerative systems sustainability success.

The above-referenced “R&D program” is a convenience for writing. It points towards the need for new additional R&D focused on closing the gap between current regenerative systems sustainability performance and that of regenerative systems sustainability. It is not only a program, an activity, that must occur somewhere, sometime, somehow, but it is a functional requirement that needs to be addressed in planning and policy. The level of innovation can be funded in a program or plan. However, typically it is not funded. In that case, partnerships can be developed with local stakeholders, including businesses and universities. Some of this R&D will necessarily need to be conducted at the state or national levels. Some can be undertaken by private firms. The point here is that the function needs to be understood, championed, and undertaken in any form that will work. Local planners may need to form a catalytic advocacy consortium to forge the needed agenda and develop partnerships with universities, and advocate for their professional organizations and/or legislators to undertake the needed innovation for systems sustainability. (NOTE:  See the Transition Lab example of The Natural Step in BAP No. 8). 

In summary, continuous innovation focused on solutions required to make the big context-shaping change of regenerative systems sustainability is essential for success. Since innovation now largely occurs at the micro project or product level, a new domain of R&D activity needs to arise focused on the additional innovation needed for the systems change from unsustainability to regenerative systems sustainability. Part of that new domain of R&D activity will arise from bottom-up initiatives related to systems challenges revealed with the implementation of policies, plans, and programs. Part of that new domain will arise from top-down initiatives that are addressing the challenges of whole systems change itself. 

Best Approach Practice No. 9:  Design new governance patterns and forms that are required to generate the decision-making intelligence needed for regenerative systems sustainability success.

This BAP would involve assessing and designing the new governance forms, agents, and processes to generate the organizational, institutional, and societal decision-making intelligence and agility required for regenerative systems sustainability success.

The unique characteristics of producing regenerative systems sustainability combine to create a new governance requirement and additional design challenge for sustainability initiatives. Those new unique characteristics include context and systems design requirements, multi-stakeholder process, working across the system,  the collective action problem, on-going innovation, the strategic nature of the challenge, and the longer time frame of the effort. They require new governance forms and roles to orchestrate the multi-stakeholder and multi-dimensional process needed for success. Each type, scale, and level of sustainability response initiative will have a smaller or larger governance design challenge, but will have one, nonetheless. 

Over the past twenty-plus years, innovation in processes of engagement and collective action have developed more powerful forms and approaches for  governance and leadership. They include systems change and multi-stakeholder processes, design of instruments, use of team building and methods of collective creativity and co-creation.

The accepted wisdom on what is termed the collective action problem provides a deep understanding of why people acting through the market create the problem (overuse of resources and inability to organize an optimum solution for the whole group of users). However, it does not address the options available for solving the collective action problem either outside or inside the market or both. As with the view that the future is not being a foregone conclusion of projected historical trends, there are other options for responding than simply acting within the market dynamics of the collective action problem. More fundamentally, the challenge is a political design problem, a governance design problem, and a leadership problem. 

Approaches to create more effective public processes, engagement, and conflict resolution, especially at scale, have evolved over the past 20+ years, and include the following.

• America Speaks 21st Century Town Meeting.

• World café.

• Scenario planning.

• Large-scale engagement and conflict resolution processes

  • The Great Bear Lake Rainforest Agreement, British Columbia.

  • The Global Climate GeoDesign Challenge.

• The art and practice of learning organizations.

• Sustainability Transition Labs.

The art and practice of learning organizations is a more fundamental innovation than a simple technique. It can best be understood as one area of knowledge that enables effective organizational action on an ongoing basis. It is not an individual problem-solving methodology to apply to any particular problem. It is a domain of knowledge, concepts, and proficiencies rooted in systems thinking that groups use together to formulate the best path forward for the group.  It is not a panacea for designing an effective response to the collective action problem or to any of the complex challenges facing individuals, organizations, and society, such as the twin interconnected challenges of climate change and unsustainability. However, a community of high-powered practitioners have systematically applied and developed the skills of a learning organization over the past 30 years on some of the toughest organizational and societal challenges. Thus, it is a rich and robust starting point for understanding and skill development in the five disciplines of learning organizations: personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking. Mastering them would be a powerful starting point for implementing BAP No. 8:  assessing and designing the new governance forms, agents, and processes to generate the organizational, institutional, and societal decision-making intelligence required for regenerative systems sustainability success. It would also be a powerful starting point and touchstone for regenerative systems sustainability planning more generally. 

A current synthesis of these approaches is being used by The Natural Step Canada in a series of multi-stakeholder initiatives, including Transition Labs. They describe it as follows:

“The Natural Step Canada works synergistically together with our strategic partner the Smart Prosperity Institute (SPI) to help accelerate Canada's journey to being a strong and inclusive economy that thrives within nature's limits.

Much of our work is done through innovation-focused multi-stakeholder initiatives that place us on the frontlines of the environment and economy, working alongside major brands, policymakers, and key stakeholders.”

The Natural Step International also has its own Transition Lab program.

In summary, to address the intractable collective action problems of the market and other conflicts of interest, innovations for more powerful engagement and more effective conflict resolution have arisen at scale over the past 20+ years, including the new domain of learning organizations. They are not panaceas, but they represent the best bets and most effective tool kit for addressing the intrinsic difficulties of democracies with democratic methods. 

Best Approach Practice No. 10:  Use full-cost decisions, funding, and 10-year budgeting to fix the broken system of public finance. 

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) prepares a report card on America’s infrastructure every four years. In 2021, the assessment resulted in a grade of C-, although up from the D+ in 2017. This grade was based on the growing investment gap, which rose from $2.2 to $2.6 trillion over the past ten years between needed expenditures and actual expenditures; a funding gap of nearly $260 billion per year. In the developing world, deferred maintenance is compounded by incomplete infrastructure that has yet to be developed initially.

The sustainability policy question is how is it legal to defer renewal and reinvestment in the foundational infrastructure of communities? A community’s needs should be prioritized and commitments to fund at least some definition of “enough service” that includes the full life cycle costs of maintenance, repair, and replacement. That commitment should be institutionalized in mandated funding for needed maintenance, repair, and replacement, not deferring it.

Annual budgeting should be conducted within a 10-year period so the effects of current trends and budget decisions can be seen over time. In the case of infrastructure, the needed spending for annual maintenance, periodic repairs, and life cycle replacement (10, 20, 30, 50+ years) should be developed and included in the related annual general fund budget or capital budgets. The longer period illuminates the year-over-year consequences of the current year’s annual budget, providing enough lead time to adjust. This approach should be extended so that the funding and solvency of all a jurisdiction’s commitments to the community can be tracked. Decisions and commitments should be based on the full costs of purchase, maintenance, and replacement (adjusted for changes in societal need over time). Deferring replacement past useful life or allowing funding to fall below sufficiency should simply not be permitted, or even better, should not be legal. 

However, deferred maintenance and replacement is also a symptom of a larger problem:  affordability. Local jurisdictions typically face limitations on the capacity to tax, and therefore related revenue. Often, they face unfunded mandates from higher-level jurisdictions that have fewer limitations on taxation. Regardless, deferred maintenance that jeopardizes the agreed-upon level of sufficient services should not be permitted. Funding and the package of sufficient services need to be optimized so that sufficient services can be funded in perpetuity from local, state, and national sources. 

The public finance challenge is figuring out how to optimize sufficient services with funding. The insufficiency of past solutions in the United States has led to the fiscalization of land use. That is, land use (zoning and economic development) decisions, in part, are made to attract taxable activity to the jurisdiction for the additional taxable revenue that will result, such as retail (sales tax) or businesses (employee tax), hotels (hotel tax), etc. The visualization of land use distorts location decisions and does not necessarily produce stable revenue streams. Some jurisdictions lose taxable land uses to nearby jurisdictions. It is also not available to all local jurisdictions. It is a temporary, limited solution that illuminates the need to fix the larger broken system of public finance. Of course, scarce resources and optimization across many services and needs will dictate compromise, but the level of compromise should be at, or above sufficient levels of service provision based on a prioritization of need and sharing of tax revenue. Unfunded mandates should not be permitted. 

In summary, deferred capital infrastructure investment is a symptom of a larger issue: insufficient local tax revenue relative to commitments, in some cases from unfunded mandates by the higher levels of government. Limited taxation capacity has led to a local tax revenue solution of encouraging taxable businesses to locate within jurisdictions, such as an office or region-serving retail. This practice is better known as the fiscalization of land use, which in turn distorts land use decisions leading to suboptimal outcomes, with some jurisdictions attracting local tax-generating business from neighboring jurisdictions. Together, they illuminate a broken system of public services and finance, which needs to be fixed so that the necessary services and associated costs can be delivered.