INNOVATION September-October 2017

F E A T U R E

BEYOND INCREMENTAL ENERGY AND CARBON GOALS IN A GLOBAL MARKET DEVELOPING CONTEXT-BASED SUSTAINABILITY STRATEGY AND GOALS

BEYOND INCREMENTAL ENERGY AND CARBON GOALS: CONTEXT-BASED GOALS

RONAN CHESTER; RYLAN DOBSON; DARA EDMONDS;

ROBIN J. MILLER

DR. JAMIE GRAY-DONALD; DOROTA KWASNIK, P.ENG.

The Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Port 2050 initiative resulted in the identification of key drivers of future change and four distinct scenarios describing plausible futures as the port moves toward 2050.

Organizational-level sustainability goals often have their roots in an organization asking itself, What could we do?, with the result being goals perceived to be readily achievable incremental steps, or alternatively as a stretch goal to spur innovation. Rarely are these goals based upon an understanding of the broader socio-ecological constraints of the systems within which the organization is operating. However, an emerging trend among organizations that are relatively mature in their approach to sustainability is a shift away from setting goals based on forecast projections of what is technologically and financially feasible, to back-casting from a principled view using socio-ecological constraints, or contextual thinking, to frame success. For example, in commercial real estate the sustainability objective has traditionally been a gradual reduction of energy consumption in buildings to offset

2 4 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 7

I N N O V A T I O N