How best to illustrate what a sustainable world would look like? I developed the video below for presentations on sustainability. The first image we see shows the three domains. The arrows indicate that the social and environmental domain at the moment are meant to contribute to the economic domain. Societies need to contribute to the economy, through consumption, labour and infrastructure. Resources in the environment are extracted to ensure continued production in the economy. This has led to the overexploitation of resources and the pollution of our environment.
The image then shows how sustainability initiatives are positioned in the three domains. Just Transition – promoted as the way to get societies to focus on a better balanced future – is followed by the Energy Transition, that promotes renewable energies that will not deplete natural resources. Kate Raworth in her Doughnut Economy promotes a circular economy that would focus on where the three circles interact. The goal is thus to bring the three circles together, so that they overlap. The transformation that we seek is thus to ensure that the social, economic and environmental domains overlap as much as possible. There are many more initiatives that work towards this end, but this shows how a sustainable future could take shape.