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> What is The Natural Step - An Overview
> A Framework
> History
What is The Natural Step - An Overview
The Natural Step (TNS) is an organisation providing a strategic planning tool for sustainability. This tool is a clear, conceptual framework that explains the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of a long-term vision for a truly sustainable society. The Natural Step Framework can be applied to businesses, non-profit organisations and community projects.
Our work takes us into corporate head offices, small and medium-sized business, central, regional and local authorities, and non-profit organisations such as schools and universities. Each organisation has different challenges, but all can benefit from the simplicity and soundness of The Natural Step's practical approach.
Our trained, accredited Advisors work with businesses and organisations helping them learn about sustainability and how to use The Natural Step Framework. We have Advisors in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and can deliver advice and support to business and organisations throughout the country by arrangement. The Natural Step team members act as educators, strategists, researchers and ongoing advisors, depending on the project.
We are an independent non-governmental charitable trust funded by grants and donations and by client fees for our business advisory services. In its early stages, The Natural Step's work in New Zealand received foundation funding from the Ministry for the Environment's Sustainable Management Fund and The Tindall Foundation, and its office at Lincoln is hosted by Landcare Research.
The Natural Step now has offices in 12 countries. It teaches, empowers and inspires businesses and organisations to redesign the way they operate in a way that is profitable, socially aware and environmentally responsible - in short, to build a more sustainable world.
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A Framework
A framework is defined as 'a structure, upon which contents can be put’. People and businesses make decisions within conceptual frameworks based on current knowledge and built up over time. The Natural Step's sustainability framework enables people to reassess their existing conceptual frameworks and check them against physical reality. Business performance and practices can then be measured against a long term view of economic, social and environmental success.
Around the world, there is mounting evidence that a strategic planning tool based on sustainability principles can provide a significant commercial and business advantage, while significantly reducing negative impacts. (See Case Studies).
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History
The Natural Step was founded in 1989 in Sweden by Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, one of Sweden’s leading cancer researchers. Dr Robèrt observed that all cells have similar basic requirements for sustaining and propagating life, but that some of these requirements were being systematically eroded by industrial activity. He also noticed time and again that when faced with a crisis, such as a child with cancer, people showed amazing depths of compassion and courage and willingness to sacrifice for others.
In an effort to move beyond the endless and confusing environmental debate between interest groups and to focus on the systemic causes of environmental degradation and decreasing human health, Dr. Robèrt set out to define the guiding principles for a sustainable society.
Dr. Robèrt worked with 50 scientific colleagues to find out what scientists actually agree on. After 21 drafts, a consensus document was achieved that described the agreed basic knowledge of how the Earth functions and how humans interact with it. The completed document was distributed to every household and school in Sweden.
In the early 1990s, Dr. Robèrt worked with a noted physicist, Dr John Holmberg, to define a set of guiding sustainability principles, based on the laws of thermodynamics and natural cycles. These principles of sustainability are the foundation of The Natural Step's content and approach.
In Sweden, The Natural Step quickly gained momentum as business and political leaders, including the King of Sweden, recognized the need to be guided by nature's cyclical processes. Major Swedish companies began incorporating The Natural Step's sustainability principles into their business practices, and political and business leaders took part in educational workshops to learn about this path-breaking approach to sustainability.
Today more than 70 Swedish municipalities and 60 corporations including IKEA, Electrolux, McDonald's Sweden and Scandic Hotels are actively using The Natural Step's principles and approach to sustainability.
Over the years the Natural Step framework has successfully developed into both an education and training package as well as a compass - an effective strategic planning tool for decision-makers.
It quickly began to spread internationally with TNS teams established in several other countries. In the early to mid-nineties, its introduction to the USA was led by Paul Hawken, author of ‘The Ecology of Commerce’ and ‘Natural Capitalism’, and to the UK by leading environmentalist, now Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, Jonathon Porritt. Both found it offered them a unique scientific model for the dissemination of sustainability at a time when that concept was too often beset with woolly thinking and confusion. Work with corporations, including Nike, Interface, McDonald's, BP Air, Sainsbury's, Panasonic, Yorkshire Water, Starbucks, Home Depot and Bank of America, and with governments and communities expanded rapidly.
Today the Natural Step framework is being successfully used by hundreds of corporations, municipalities, government agencies, educational institutions and non-profit organisations around the world. As an organisation, The Natural Step now has offices in Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil, Israel, Italy and France. The Natural Step International was formed in 1999.
The Natural Step began in New Zealand in 1997 with the registration of a charitable trust. The new organisation's license agreement with The Natural Step International was completed in 1999 and a team of advisors was assembled and trained soon after.
The Natural Step has gained significant international recognition. In 1999 The Natural Step was awarded Gorbachev's Millennium Award for International Environmental Leadership by Global Green USA, the American affiliate of Green Cross International, and in 2001 Karl-Henrik Robèrt was awarded the prestigious Blue Planet Award, the environmental equal of a Nobel Prize. Thousands of individuals and organisations have been educated in The Natural Step's principles and approach. These people are leading the way to a sustainable future.
For more on the History of The Natural Step:
Robèrt, Karl-Henrik. 2002. ‘The Natural Step Story: Seeding a Quiet Revolution’. Gabriola Island, BC: Order through Amazon.com
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