In our CONVOCO! Podcast Corinne M. Flick speaks with Philipp Pattberg, Director of the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute, about:
On the Verge of a New Green World
Here’s what he said:
Sustainability problems are wicked problems. Problems that don’t have one definition, problems that don’t even have a proper solution… These wicked problems require interdisciplinary thinking.
We do not have the luxury to think about these problems for another 100 years […] We have basically two decades to really turn this ship around.
There’s a real problem in thinking that we have to give something up. You don’t drive a car and that’s a loss, but you also live longer because there is no air pollution and that’s a win. We never discuss it that way.
For the last 20 or 30 years, we have been a bit naive in thinking that the market will solve any type of problem. It doesn’t.
If there is no biodiversity, there is no life for humans. We really are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.
The economy needs to change, our behaviour needs to change, the way we do many things needs to change, and that’s why these problems are so complex and so difficult to address.
We have global problems, but regional applications and local conditions. Thinking about how to solve these problems becomes fairly difficult because of the way the international system is structured.