When Sustainability Stops Working, It’s a Signal
By Nick Grimm, Sr. Sustainability Consultant
Last month, we examined where leverage lies within the entertainment industry and why focusing on sustainability too narrowly at one stage can limit its impact (Read Here). This month, we’re examining a deeper cause of stalled sustainability efforts.
It’s not a lack of commitment from the people doing the work; it’s an underlying assumption within most systems that no longer holds: companies cannot pursue limitless growth, while simultaneously becoming more sustainable.
Too often, sustainability becomes efficiency in the service of expansion.
For years, this assumption went largely unquestioned because the work felt productive. Emissions and waste targets were set. Renewables replaced fossil fuels. Reports documented progress. Yet something uncomfortable has become harder to ignore: total emissions continue to rise as overall resource use expands, supply chains grow more volatile, and environmental pressures intensify as more planetary boundaries are breached. (See Planetary Health Check)
This is more than a signal, it’s an alarm that the system being optimized may be misaligned with the outcomes sustainability is meant to achieve.
As we noted in January, systems thinking teaches that when incremental improvements stop producing meaningful change, you’ve likely reached a leverage point. Many sustainability programs I’ve encountered seem to have reached that point.
Take decarbonization: as goals are set, data improves, and emissions per unit decline, absolute emissions often continue to rise because overall operations continue to expand.
Efficiencies gained in one area are redeployed to support growth in another. This dynamic is known as the Jevons Paradox. It shows that efficiency improvements within a growth-oriented system will increase total consumption, thus emissions, rather than reduce it. Emissions and growth can not be decoupled within correct emissions boundaries. This is an uncomfortable truth, especially for those of us doing the work.
Efficiency has been in the service of growth; sufficiency is in the service of alignment, aligning operations with ecological limits, and long-term resilience.
Sufficiency means intentionally determining what is sufficient rather than allowing ecological limits to determine it, for us.
Sufficiency asks whether certain products or activities are genuinely necessary, whether scale increases fragility rather than resilience, whether durability should be prioritized over volume, and what assumptions about growth are shaping our decisions. These are not ideological questions; they are questions about risk, resilience, and long-term viability.
In a world of ecological overshoot and social strain, continuing to grow simply because growth is expected is no longer neutral. It is a strategic choice and an increasingly risky one.
The early signals of a shift are becoming visible with some organizations investing in reuse, repair, and shared infrastructure, and questioning whether growth at all costs is serving their mission. This is not radical. It’s an increasingly pragmatic and necessary response to the emerging pressures society faces.
Sustainability is a systems and governance challenge. The organizations most likely to remain viable in the decades ahead are not those that optimize efficiencies for growth, but those willing to align purpose, governance, and operations with a world that cannot continue to breach the physical limits our planet has available. (See Planetary Health Check)
When familiar solutions stop working, it’s not a failure of effort; it’s not a failure of commitment, it’s feedback that the system is incompatible with the sustainable outcomes we’re after, and a new system is required.
