Design Can drive Sustainability Vol. 1

The podcast is created based on the desire to share the pool of knowledge that exists within the subject of design in Denmark. We believe that design is more than decoration. Design can make people feel and can make a real difference. In the podcast, Kristina May, CEO and partner at AM Copenhagen, explores all aspects of the huge subject of design and branding. We delve into ideas and projects, talk to professionals and companies, and we bring together those who work actively with design and branding every day.

What’s the difference between climate and the environment? In this interview, Katherine Richardson assists us in clarifying sustainability concepts and the fundamentals of sustainability.?

Katherine Richardson is Professor in marine biology, Head of the Sustainability Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the main organizers behind the scientific conference Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions. She was also Chairman of the Climate Commission, which in 2010 reported and presented a proposal on how Denmark could become fossil-free by 2050, and is a member of the Danish Council on Climate Change. In addition, she was one of the 15 independent researchers appointed by Ban Ki-moon to prepare the 2019 UN Global Development Report.?

Kristina May is a Founding Partner and Brand Specialist at AM Copenhagen. Kristina invented the podcast Design Kan, the number one design podcast in Denmark and has hosted more than 80 episodes over the past four years.?

Mads Kj?ller Damkj?r is a Designer and Expert in Sustainable Business Development. Mads co-interviews with Kristina in a series of interviews about sustainability.

Kristina: We have chosen to create a series of interviews with a focus on sustainability. In each interview, we invite a guest who lives and breathes the sustainability agenda. Either within impact investment, architecture, research, infrastructure and much more.?

This is the first interview in the series, so we need to get some basic principles right. For that, we couldn’t think of a more knowledgeable guest than you, Katherine Richardson.?

Mads: So Katherine, there are so many concepts and words in sustainability, climate and our whole world situation. Can you try to introduce us to some of them and give a picture of what’s been going on?

Katherine: Yes, I would love to, because there are so many words and they are used in many different ways. I like to say that sustainability is not a place or a state. You can’t talk about a sustainable technology or a sustainable product.

Sustainability is really a constant quest to ensure that the benefit we get from using the earth’s resources comes with a minimum of environmental and social cost. So sustainability is really about cost-effectiveness, but where we don’t think in terms of money, and we’re used to that, we think in terms of resources.

A lot of people mistakenly think that you can equate climate and sustainability. You can’t. Climate is a small, very small part of the whole sustainability challenge. The problem is that our ancestors, when they stopped running after their food and swapped that nomadic life for a fixed address, dropped their waste products exactly where they were produced, and they took exactly what they thought they needed from nature.

Whether it was wild, eating trees or bush to burn for energy, they just took them. And then when they became sufficiently numerous, they looked around and said, “This is not going to work. We’re getting sick from water contaminated by our own waste products. We need to make some rules about where we can dispose of our waste. And we’re running out of hunting games and something to burn, so we need to make some rules that you can only shoot what you can eat, and you can’t hunt pregnant animals, etc.

And it was for their own sake. It wasn’t for the resources. It was so they could continue to thrive. And when we became more people, we looked around and said, “This isn’t going to work either.” Because if we want clean water or air here in Denmark, we can’t let Swedes, Poles and Germans throw all their waste into the air and water. So we realized that even at a regional level, where we have to manage our relationship with resources if we want clean air and water in Denmark, we can’t let all the neighboring countries throw their waste into the air and water.

And what the climate and biodiversity crisis is convincing us of is that now there are so many of us, we must also manage our relationship with global resources. Because for decades, green organizations have been saying that we need to save the planet. We shouldn’t worry about the planet at all. It’s going to be fine. This is about saving the conditions that we as humans depend on. So the whole sustainability challenge is that we need to take care of our demand for the earth’s resources. And when I say the earth’s resources, it’s not just the minerals we dig up. It’s also how we can use the land, or how much we can use the land as a waste dump. So the whole climate is a waste problem. So we had some greenhouse gas waste, we thought it was gone, and then whoops, it’s discovered. It wasn’t there. So this whole sustainability challenge is about bringing and maintaining our demand for the earth’s resources within the available supply.

And if everyone on Earth lived the way we do in Denmark, we would need 4.6 Earths. And my friends over in astronomy tell me that there are not 4.6 Earths out there that can provide us with the resources we depend on.

It’s also about not reconciling ourselves with our waste. As a biologist, I can say that if you take a microorganism bring it to the lab, and break it into a flask with lots of nutrient salt and good things to eat, then at first it grows very slowly, just like humans did. So is the world population. Then it takes off, just like humans did. Then it starts to run out of resources, then the growth gets a little bit slower, and eventually, it dies because it gets poisoned by its waste products. That’s our problem now as humans, that we just throw out all our waste and think it’s gone.

Even as a marine biologist, I’m absolutely horrified by the discourse we have in society about plastic in the oceans. Because we’ve had images of the earth from space for 50 years, since 1972, the Apollo missions, where we can clearly see that the earth’s resources must be limited, and there’s no tube or umbilical cord, so when we throw stuff out, it can’t get away. And we’ve been throwing out plastic since the 50s, and knowing that it was pretty much unusable in nature, that’s why we like it. So we’ve been throwing it out since the 50s. We’ve had a picture of the earth since 1972 that shows that there’s nowhere for it to go because there’s no touching, and over two-thirds of the earth is covered by ocean.

Honestly, it’s not rocket science to figure out that the plastic is obviously in the ocean.

Kristina: That’s a good example with the flask. I can’t help but think that it’s a very clear and simple picture of the challenge. That’s of course also why you came up with it, Katherine, but it’s still a bit of an eye-opener to hear it that way and to hear it one-on-one.

Could you briefly explain sustainability in this context?

Katherine: Sustainability is very simple. It’s a question of ensuring that our total demand for the earth’s resources, people’s total demand for the earth’s resources, does not exceed supply. It’s also a question of how we distribute the limited resources, not only among the soon-to-be 9-10 billion people but also all other living organisms. Of course, it explains why you can’t say that this is a sustainable technology.

Because it’s how we use technology that’s interesting, and does it lead us to use fewer resources? I can’t point to a single technological objection that has led us to use fewer resources in the long run. It tends to be that more people get access to those resources, so the overall demand is higher.?

Mads: So it’s really about behaviour and how we use the tools that we have as new technologies.

Katherine: It’s very much about behaviour, and it’s about how we set up our economic system and our governance system because it also helps regulate our behaviour. I can give you a good example of why it’s important to have all of these factors in play when you want to act sustainably. And that is that about 15 years ago, politicians in the EU decided that we were putting too much strain on the climate with our private cars, so they set new standards for cars. After which the engineers and technology nerds made cars that ran longer on litres, and then you say “Woah, we have a more sustainable car here.”

After which we in Denmark lowered the price of cars, which affected our behaviour and made us buy more cars, and we drove more in cars, and now we burdened the climate more with our private cars than before we got so-called sustainable or more sustainable technology.

Kristina: So now we’ve covered sustainability. What about climate?

Katherine: If sustainability consists of how much we take out and use of the system and how much waste we put into the system, then climate is just some of the waste that we put into the system. It’s the waste that goes directly, the greenhouse gas waste that goes into the atmosphere. But we still have plastics, we still have antibiotics, we still have toxic industrial compounds, we still have reactive nitrogen, and we still have pesticides.

We have many other forms of waste that we throw into the?world that are also part of the sustainability issue.

Kristina: So you think climate takes up too much space? Or is climate talk too much? Should we be talking about it in a broader fight in relation to waste? Or is it because it’s the most pressing issue we’re facing right now?

Katherine: I think it’s actually a journey of realization that we’re all on. And for most people, it started when we got that image of Earth from space. And you don’t have all people in the same place in this. It’s like a normal distribution. So you have very few people who are at the forefront of this discussion, and some people who still have the whole, most people are in the middle. And 20 years ago, those who were at the forefront, the front edge of this cure, were talking about climate change. 10 years ago, they were talking about planetary boundaries and biodiversity. Now the leading edge is talking about systemic change, i.e. transforming the processes we have in our society.

And all this time, while the front edge has been moving, the top has also moved with it. And now the top has come to climate. But because we have seen where the leading edge has been, we can?

say that the next thing is biodiversity. We’re not going to stop at just climate change. Climate is not sustainability. Climate is a place that is very easy for people to see. Partly where it comes from, but also the effects it has. It’s more complicated and more indirect, often in relation to, for example, biodiversity.

So I think the climate is a really good place to start. But it’s important to keep in mind that if it hadn’t been discovered in the 70s by total coincidence, it was actually when military research was going on in space, that it was discovered that humans were destroying the ozone hole.?

If it hadn’t been discovered by pure coincidence, then we wouldn’t be talking about climate today. We were so preoccupied with the lack of management of the ozone hole. It is still a problem, but we have brought it back to something manageable.

And we did it together with the rest of the world. We have shown through the Montreal Protocol from 1987 that we can manage our relationship with resources globally. Now, it was a thousand times easier with ozone-depleting substances, because there were very few producers and there?were alternatives, etc.

But the point is still important, I think, that people say that we can’t manage our resources at the?global level because we don’t have, and we don’t want a global authority. But we can, and we actually are. That’s what we’re doing in all of our, all of these political discussions around climate, where unfortunately NGOs and journalists come after every COP meeting and say “That was a mistake!” or that “didn’t solve the problem!”

But we’re not going to solve the problem in one meeting. This is a journey, a process that we’re on, and we’ve actually come a long?way from where we were 10-15 years ago.

Mads: One of the things that I think recurs in many discussions about climate and our global challenges is whether we’re moving fast enough now. In other words, our solutions, even though it’s clear that we’re not going to solve it in one meeting, and there will continue to be new problems, I assume. But can we, the situation we are in, can we reach, that is, do we have enough time to solve, the challenges we have?

Katherine: Fortunately, Mads, no one can answer that question. We don’t know exactly how much time we have left, where the magic limit is, or where there is a magic limit. We don’t know exactly where it is, but we know that the danger, i.e. the risks we run, is increasing with each passing day that we don’t get a handle on this. So I can’t answer whether it’s going fast enough.

Kristina: Are you optimistic?

Katherine: I’m optimistic. For several reasons, actually. But one of the things I’m concerned with is actually these natural tipping points. That is, in a complex system, something can suddenly happen that melts all the ice on Greenland, for instance, which will have some feedback to the climate system, which will end up making global warming worse.

But there are also social tipping points. We’ve seen them, when we went from horse-drawn carriages to cars, it went insanely fast. And the same could be said for the way smoking came out into society. It’s not that many years ago, that here in Denmark, the very best thing you could give someone getting confirmation if you could afford it, was to remove their teeth and give them artificial ones so they wouldn’t have to fight with the dental hygienist all their lives.

Now those poor school dentists can barely find a tooth they can treat. So there are social tipping points, and I think it’s starting to happen so fast that we are aware that if we want, and we do, to continue to develop our society, we have to do things differently.

So for the sake of our children and our descendants, we need to find new ways of doing things. And we hear politicians, we hear companies, and it’s not just words, a lot of it, there’s also action behind it. I’ve been in this industry for a long time and I’m coming straight from a meeting now with the same funding people and they understand this. They’re going to use their power of investment to drive this agenda forward.

So it’s going faster and faster. If we take the speed at which we’ve been moving for the last several years and extrapolate from that, I don’t think we’re going to make it. I don’t think it’s going fast enough. We have to believe that we will have an exponential curve. But it’s happened before, why shouldn’t it happen now?

Mads: The exponential curve will then be in relation to something you call systemic change. It will be our behaviour, maybe legislation, or companies with ethical attitudes and values, where that go in and pull the wool over your eyes.

Katherine: I think you’ve actually hit the nail on the head about ethics culture and values. One thing that we simply have to do is to recognize that we are part of a larger system. We’ve kind of taken all our legislation and made it as if we’re the biggest and everything else is right underneath us. If you look at our climate law in Denmark, it says that we must reduce our emissions.?

There were guiding principles. Cost-effectiveness, employment, competitiveness, leakage, make sure it doesn’t turn the empty other side down. Where do you think it’s mentioned? Biodiversity or environment?

No chance, that is not in that equation at all. Despite the fact that over half of our so-called green or white renewable energy is from using biomass. So we have to recognize that we are part of a system and there are interactions within a system that we have to deal with.?

Kristina: I’ll come back to our conceptual framework. We’ve talked about climate and sustainability. What about the environment?

Katherine: Environment is simply the external conditions we experience. It’s a combination. It is much more. It’s also nature. Inside, it’s our climate. When you and I go outside, or also inside. Design people, you know, there’s also an environment in a building. The environment is what we experience outside. The cleanest environment is clearly where you are in pristine nature. Whether there’s anything left on earth at all, I’m not really sure. A complete idiot could say that when it’s filled with waste, plastic or whatever, it’s a deterioration of that environment.

Before we talk about climate change, I’d rather talk about environmental change. Because the conditions we experience here on Earth are a combination of the energy balance that the Earth has. This is what we call climate. How much heat do we get from the sun? How does it move around? Where does it come into contact with? So that’s within the climate.

It’s the interaction between that energy and life that makes conditions here on Earth different from every other planet. It’s not the climate that makes us unique. Everyone has a climate because they all get heat from the sun. We don’t know what life is, but we know what it does. This means that it actually converts these building blocks that are left over from the Big Bang. These elements are also on other planets, but there they are more or less inert.

They don’t really react to each other. But here on Earth, we have a life before they make these transformations and make new products and molecules out of it. It’s thanks to the fact that we have air in the atmosphere that allows us to breathe. We have an ozone layer that protects us from the sun’s dangerous rays. So it’s the interaction between life and climate that shapes the environment.?

Mads: What do you think we need to do to design our way out of the situation we’re in?

In this sense, the decisions we need to make when we talk about systemic change, behaviour, production and the way we eat and act in general. What does it take in a larger perspective for us to either change that behaviour or what kind of behaviour do we need to change??

Katherine: I’d like to start by picking up the thread of systemic transformation. We haven’t explained what that is. I can use it best by using the food system. We all eat, so it’s a system we think we know.

Up until now, you’ve taken a worse development. For example, now, because we came up with a tractor, let’s see where that tractor takes us. So it’s completely organic development. Now we look around and say, yikes, we’re going to have to feed 9-10 billion people soon.?

The agriculture we have today is responsible for about 80% of our biodiversity loss. It’s responsible for the fact that we don’t have enough forest left. It contributes a third of the food system, both production and consumption. A third of greenhouse gasses and waste. I could go on and on.

Denmark has 62% of our land area for agriculture. Some of it is for animals, for cattle of course. But the majority of what we have under the plough is used to make feet for animals. And that’s interesting on a global scale. We actually use an area equivalent to North and South America combined.

In addition, we have an area equivalent to China and South-West Asia, which we use for our plant production. A third of what we produce is never eaten. So the only thing we got out of it was some very expensive employment.

Mads: And at the same time, there are people sitting around and not getting enough to eat.

Katherine: There’s also a bunch who get too much or the wrong thing, an obesity epidemic. 1 out of 6 people are malnourished, in that they don’t get enough to eat. Now we need to say “We need to feed 9-10 billion without destroying the climate and biodiversity.”?

We can see that if we just take the system we have today and scale it up, it will lead to an approximately 90% increase in greenhouse gas emissions. And that would require us to use 50% more land. And that doesn’t work. It can’t be done. So now we have to plan our way out of it. And fortunately, there’s plenty of research that says it can be done. But many of us will have to eat differently.

Here in Denmark, the climate impact of our diet is 45% above the global average. In other words, we have a huge impact because we eat a lot of meat and animal products. We are far above the EU average as well. We are really shocked when it comes to that. So it’s our behaviour. Its productivity changes. Not necessarily in Denmark, but maybe in Denmark, where a cow on a good day can produce 40 litres of milk a day and average 26 litres a year. In Africa, a cow produces 6 litres per day on average. Where are we when we need productivity changes?

Mads: I’ve heard something about a milk cow in Denmark living for 2.5 years. Normally they can live 20 years, but because we milk them so hard, it’s a hard life.?

Katherine: The point is that we have to very consciously say that we have so many resources we can give to this project, like money. The earth’s resources are our real currency. So we have to think about them, and that’s going to answer your question.

If the earth’s resources are our real currency, and we need to use them cost-consciously, and we can transform them to feed 9-10 billion people, and we can’t do more than that, what does that require from different parts of this? You can do that. Then we come to design. It’s exactly the same thing where you say that the benefit that society, or the individual person, where you are in the process of designing, the benefit that we get out of it, must come at the absolute minimum cost in relation to the earth’s resources and how we distribute them, so you get the social part of it as well.

So I like to think about the fact that we have these arrows from all our activities that either take something out of the earth or put waste in. And those arrows need to be minimized, and where they can be, they need to be eliminated. And I think that’s actually important in design. I mean, for most products, the majority of their environmental impact, comes in the design phase.?

Kristina: It’s really a shoutout to all the designers out there as well. I think it’s really interesting when you talk about systemic change. What can I do?

One thing is that we sit and talk about it on this level, we had this talk, Mads and I, just before you came in today. What is it as individuals, what can we do? How can we be part of this development? Is it to stop eating meat and stop driving a car? What can we do? Because we are all sitting with a huge powerlessness as individuals in relation to this.

Katherine: I think as individuals, there’s a lot we can do. The first thing is, of course, that we let our decision-makers know that we want this. So the way you vote and what you say to your politicians is the alpha omega in this. I think one of the worst things you can do is go around saying that you’re a bad person because you eat meat. Or you’re a bad person because you fly.

Because you and I may have the same amount of money in the bank, but I can guarantee you that we will prioritize how we use it differently. And if we think of the earth’s resources as our true currency, then the same must apply. I have a family in the US which means I’m going to fly. But conversely, I have to cut back on other areas of my life. And I remember a time when we still had a radio station called 24/7.?

There was a very sweet little girl who was going to ask me questions about the climate. She said to me, have you ever not bought a piece of clothing because of your climate concerns?

And then I thought about it a bit, and then I had to say, no, I don’t think about my climate, and I’ve never thought about climate when I’ve bought clothes. But you need to know that I don’t actually buy a lot of clothes. I can’t remember exactly when I bought this sweater. But I do remember wearing it when I was pregnant. And at that time, my youngest child was 26 years old. And I still have that sweater.

Kristina: So it’s an accounting that we each have as well. It’s our own household, so we must somehow be able to understand the picture individually so that we can make this resource optimization and downscaling.

Katherine: It’s turning off the lights and turning off the water. Cycling when you can cycle, or walking when you can walk. It’s not shopping just because it’s fun to shop, but because you need something. And when you buy something, it’s something that can either be reused or is recyclable.

It may be a bit expensive, but it’s really important that it’s something that you can get the most out of the resources. My husband is a royal hunter, so we eat meat. But on the other hand, we also get a seasonal vegetarian box several days a week, and we love it. We would never dream of giving it up.?

And now, thankfully, we’ve learned how to cook vegetarian food. So it’s not just the three days a week we get vegetarian food, but the end result is that we never buy meat.

I mean, we eat some game that came from hunting, but I can’t remember the last time I bought meat. So it’s not a question of it not being black and white. So it’s not the culture of caution, that’s not what it’s about, that’s not what we’re aiming for.

It’s cost-efficient. I spend my money differently, or differently from the way you spend yours.?

Mads: It requires that we know how much of the world’s money we have in the bank and what things cost. If we want to get there, I’ll just ask?

for the room rather than you, where we go to the grocery store and there are two prices, it says both what it costs in kroner or dollars and what it costs in the earth’s resources.

Katherine: Well Mads, that’s a really interesting question, because again, it’s not going to happen overnight, but we’re slowly but surely moving in that direction. There are a lot of researchers who are actually trying to figure out what it is per person out there. Instead of doing LCAs, i.e. Life Cycle Analysis, which just says that this product uses less than this product, tries to change it to have absolutely as much impact as this one, and then at some point, society will have to decide whether or not we want to prioritize using the earth’s resources on this particular type of product.

Kristina: Yes, and supermarkets can start doing their own shopping in relation to this. How much do they want within their small system??

Katherine: There is a lot going on in the EU and also in the Danish Plan right now about creating certification orders, so when you go to the supermarket, you can see how much impact there will be.

And you see it, it comes right into?a couple of climate council reporters, for example, who say, okay, we use so much biomass on people in our heating or energy system in Denmark. It has been calculated that there is probably x amount of sustainable biomass on earth. If you divide that over all the people we have, then Denmark is above average.

And in the latest report on our eating habits, Denmark’s impact, the impact of our eating habits on the climate, is plotted against the EU’s, against the world average. And also, interestingly enough, in relation to public dietary guidelines. The public dietary guidelines if everyone ate according to them.

But the climate dietary guidelines have just arrived. But that’s what I’m talking about. And if everyone ate according to them in Denmark, then the average Dane, between 6 and 64, I think, because toddlers and the elderly need more meat than the middle group there.

But if everyone did that, the average Dane could reduce the climate impact from their diet between 31 and 45 per cent. But the problem is that no one is eating according to the public guidelines, i.e. dietary advice. One of the things we see in the Danish Council on Climate Change is that of the 650,000 meals a day that the Danish state serves, what if they met the public dietary guidelines?

Kristina: They don’t. But is that because there is no legislation in the area? Is it because it’s just advice? So what do you see as a possible solution that would move things forward??

Katherine: I actually think it would be a very good start to say that we try to use the public dietary guidelines, at least as a guideline in public meals.

Because, I know, because we’ve started eating a lot of vegetarian food, it requires that you learn to cook vegetarian food. But until I started doing this and learned, thanks to those boxes, every time I had a vegetarian visit, I made it, so I had potatoes there, I had vegetables there, and then I looked at this empty space on the side dish. Why do you do this? That’s not how you make vegetarian food.?

Kristina: I’d like to ask about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Could you put it into words??

Katherine: Yes, I actually think it’s so fantastic. I’m stealing the words of John Elkington, the man who discovered the triple bottom line back in the day. Because he calls them a purchase order for the future. And I think that’s so beautiful. And it’s clear that we all have a responsibility to deliver on them. I think most people have not understood what the SDGs are all about.

First of all, they are something special, because, despite the fact that we have had the image of the earth from space since 1972, that is 50 years, where it is clear that the earth’s resources must be limited. It wasn’t until we got the SDGs that we got an international agreement that recognizes that the Earth’s resources are limited. Wow!

And the reason why that’s interesting, or why it took so long, I think, is that the moment you recognize that something is limited, then you have to start discussing how you want to distribute it. And the other thing that’s interesting about the SDGs is that there’s nothing new on the list.

We knew long before 2015 that we had challenges in all those boxes, and we had UN agreements in most of the boxes on women, climate, biodiversity, peace, on I could go on and on. So what’s new with these SDGs? It’s that you bring them into the same framework. And when you do that, it’s not the individual boxes that are suddenly in focus, but the interactions between them.

And it’s really, really important, I think, to remember that that’s what matters. I’ve done workshops with many companies, and a few years ago I was working with some in the pharmaceutical industry. They want to implement the SDGs and they came in and said that numbers 3 and 8 are us. We save lives and we make money, and we’re really good at both.

And I said, yeah, that sounds about right. Those are the ones where you can make a positive difference. But if you find two you think you’re good at, then you have to find two you think you’re bad at and show how you want to do better, because otherwise, it won’t make any difference to the SDGs.

Then they went back to their groups and said that some of what we produce is a bit expensive and that personalized medicine, which is the future, may not be all that accessible, so maybe number 10, that’s what it’s called, presents some challenges. Yes, I said, that sounds right and what can we do about it? And we had a good chat. Then I said, okay, that was 1. Now I have to go back and find the other one.

They went back to their workgroups and they worked their asses off until they were bloody. And then they came back and said, there’s nothing on this list that’s relevant to us. Well, I said, that’s great. It doesn’t mean producing anything in or packaging anything in plastic. God, we hadn’t thought of that at all, I see. And that’s what the SDGs are supposed to do. It should force you to think about those interactions, to think systemically.

We are part of an ecosystem, the Earth’s ecosystem. And we talked earlier about the idea of being in a flask. In nature, individual organisms don’t go to ground in the same way as when they’re inside a flask because they’re part of an ecosystem. And in ecosystems, waste is not produced. It doesn’t exist. Somebody has gone in and learned how to use it, use the energy that’s in it, and make it completely circulate and reuse it in the system. And that’s exactly what we need to learn to do.

But if you want to worry or if you want to think about interactions between the SDGs, it’s important that you also see how each one is doing. And the group I was in at the UN in 2019, we tried to find out how they’re doing. And COVID has come in between times, and some things have become slower than they were before. But the general picture still holds true. And that’s for a lot of the things that have to do with people. That is child mortality, neonatal mortality, getting children into school, getting access to electricity, getting access to toilets, eliminating extreme poverty, and eliminating hunger.

Well, it’s actually going really well. But for some of the goals, the trend is wrong. This means that we are getting further away from goal achievement with each passing day. What kind of goals are these? It’s malnutrition. Not because you don’t get enough to eat, but because we have an epidemic of obesity, that’s what Spar2 says. It’s inequality. I think we have 18 people who own as much as the poorest 50% of the world’s population. It’s our material, ecological footprint, what we take out of nature. It’s climate and it’s biodiversity. Then you can say I’m more interested in people, and we focus on people, and if we have time and money, we go back. You can’t. Because all the goals that improve it for people come with costs on climate and biodiversity. And they are borderline resources.?

Mads: So while some things have gone up, it’s been a direct cause of them going down.

Katherine: You can easily celebrate that even though the sales pitch in our bank account is degrading, we just can’t do it forever. And when it comes down to it, the real currency that pays for our development in society is actually the earth’s resources. We can use the proxy, biodiversity and climate for the earth’s resources. Then we are using our natural capital. We need to bend the curve. So that’s where I think the goals are so fantastic.

Kristina: I have to say that from a design and branding perspective, the UN goals have also succeeded in creating something that works really well in terms of design. And branding-wise, it works really well. That’s something we can talk about and understand.?

You talked about how we’ve always been measured in many boxes. Now it’s been visualized for us. It’s easier to understand. I can see?

that you’re wearing the brooch. That’s a signal. It’s a language that is told immediately. It’s very simple. That’s one of the areas where the design has visualized this strategy.

Mads: Jonathan Safran Fowl, an author, has in one of his books described the climate crisis and environmental challenges as probably one of the most boring stories. Also because it is so difficult for us to understand and because it has such long-lasting consequences.

The UN goals have certainly helped to tell a better story. A story we can understand.?

Kristina: Yes, and that we can share with each other. It’s also difficult to relate to something you won’t be able to put into words yourself anyway.?

Katherine: If you don’t understand the context. I think in general in our society, natural history has always consisted of describing living and non-living objects in the universe. And we haven’t worried much about interactions.

You can see it in our universities. We have geology there, we have math there, we have economics there, and in Copenhagen, we put people out on Amager. So we operate as if we think that if we could put all the details in our own box and then throw all those boxes into a pot and stir them, we would understand where the earth is. But that would be like asking all the doctors you know. Put their knowledge in a box. All that specialized knowledge. You won’t know what a human being lasts by doing that. It’s the interactions between the different parts that make us what we are.

And we are 10 years too late. No one would have thought that your intestinal flora was important for anything other than your digestion. But now they know that it’s part of your mental state and your immune system hinges on what’s in your stomach.?

Kristina: I think that has to be our final word. It was simply an amazing experience to have you with us. Katherine, thank you so much for sharing your extreme knowledge. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we could have gone on for hours. And we might even ask to bring you in one more time.

Thank you for listening to the DesignKan podcast. The guest was Katherine Richardson. You can follow the podcast on Design Kan’s website, Facebook profile or on AM Copenhagen’s Instagram. The episode was recorded, edited and mixed by Tobias Adermat. I hope to hear from you in the next episode, where we will once again explore all things Design Kan.