We recognize that many groups are actively working to develop alternative indicators for sustainability. We embark on this study to see if calibrating biocapacity may offer the kind of impact valuation for agriculture which does not exist in the market economy and its system of metrics.

Essentially, Biocapacity is the dynamic balance point between the number of organisms within a given area and the amount of resources that are needed to support them within this area. Thus, agricultural biocapacity indicates the degree to which the population of a bioregion is greater or lesser than the food that is available from the bioregion to feed it.

By combining scientific reason with place-based knowledge, culture and history, biocapacity provides a baseline for sustainability by showing how different interventions will effect different outcomes. This allows communities to develop evidence-based guidelines for organizing their own resource sufficiency while regenerating the ecology of their life-places.

Excerpts

On Bioregionalism in the Bay Area

Gradually, this eclectic group of naturalists began to call their field “bioregionalism” (bio is the Greek word for life; regere is the Latin word for a place to be managed). So, bioregionalism is essentially the idea of lifeplace — a way of extending the life of a community to the life of the biosphere through the ecological renewal of a particular area. The new bioregionalists wanted to combine local knowledge, beliefs and values with the unique characteristics of the climate and topography, the soils and plants, and the animals and habitats where they lived.

These ideas spread across the United States, but San Francisco was the epicenter for this people’s movement. They called on citizens to stop running away from the problems of industrial economy to better understand the land around them, the limits to its resources, and how this could help meet the needs of the diverse species who live there, including homo sapiens. Their vision was the development of new social and cultural relationships within the context of geographical communities.

Bioregionalism was a unique perspective for addressing major environmental challenges on a human scale. It acknowledged that solving large ecological problems by ‘thinking globally’ is much too disempowering for the average person. Although ‘acting locally’ is clearly the practical first step, it operates on too small a scale to impact environmental governance. The activities of localization simply don’t generate enough political power within small communities to stop centralized governments and markets from exploiting these decentralized life-places for their own ends.

The bioregionalists explained why there are so few decision-making organizations or networks at regional levels, where harmful ecological problems could be most effectively addressed. They showed how history and economics had prompted leaders to draw artificial local, state and national borders that seldom conformed to the ecological zones which overlap with them. Hence, natural boundaries have little correlation with our present political, economic and social boundaries and their institutions. To be sure, many ecological problems — involving personal and collective choices and action, as well as their cumulative effects on human lives — cannot be resolved within existing political jurisdictions. Ultimately, we become inhabitants separated from our own habitats.

How is cooperation over resources even possible if our geographical borders cannot be redrawn to protect and manage the environment? An engaged movement for a more ecological society cannot succeed without some kind of graphic image of the bioregional boundaries which are hidden from view. Such a map would focus on a region’s hydrology, geology and physiography, but also reflect its culture, history, present land-use patterns and climate.

From the Conclusion

Based on our research, most of the region will exceed its biocapacity to produce food for its growing population within two or three decades.

Industrial pollution, climate change, sea level rise, invasive species, water diversions and loss of wetlands are threatening enormous swaths of human habitat. Before 2050, the prodigious agricultural production of the San Francisco Bay Watershed will fail to produce sufficient quantities of agriculture for its population due to uncertain rainfall, flooded coasts and inlets, depletion of aquifers, topsoil loss, an export-led business model and a lack of cooperative dialogue among its political subdivisions.

Our study indicates that locally-produced calories have more monetary and ecological value when consumed in the same life-places where they are produced. Yet as long as the San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward MSA continues to import agriculture from elsewhere, the community will be impacted by rising food prices. Importing food into the dense population of the Bay Area will be possible until its food suppliers — foreign, domestic and regional — face their own supply limits for finite energy and raw materials and the breakdown of their own their fragile infrastructures.

When the Bay Area becomes too severe a strain on the bioregion itself, the reversal will be rapid. The external dependency on food will collapse and the capacity of the entire San Francisco Bay Watershed to sustain itself will be overtaken by extreme costs in food, water, energy and housing.

Why do we exploit our ecosystems instead of restoring them as life-places for habitation? This was the basic question raised in 1968. Now, ironically, San Francisco’s ‘back to the land’ diaspora could turn into a mass evacuation from the region as its resources continue to decline and its self-sufficiency falters. How this existential crisis is addressed in the San Francisco Bay Watershed — and in bioregions everywhere — will determine the ecological future of all life-places and our sustainability as a species. The question then will be, not how sustainable but how inhabitable is my own bioregion?

Still, if there’s any area that can break down the barriers between people and their land-place, integrating the human community with the ecological community, it’s the Bay Area — the spot where modern bioregionalism began and remains a vital part of the cultural memory. Community members are the very organisms that depend on environmental resources for support.

Now we must learn how to restore this dynamic balance. The issue is not if we have the will to do this, but how soon can it be done?

For more information, please contact James Quilligan or Patti Ellis at economicdemocracyadvocates.org

Photo by RhyoR

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Excerpts from Stefan Heidenreich‘s new book on the post-currency future, republished from Transmediale.

Stefan Heidenreich’s book recently published by Merve Verlag is titled Money (2017). What it presents is not exactly a polemic against money, but rather a convincing speculation that soon we may not need money at all. While the notion that currency might soon become obsolete sounds like science fiction to many, Heidenreich argues that we are likely already within the first phase of a media transition leading to that point. Given the complex information infrastructures that have already been developed for documenting transactions, tying consumer habits to identities, and accurately predicting future exchanges, the substructure of a new kind of economy is now in place. In the following excerpts from his book (translated from the German), Heidenreich explores the potential ways this system might function, based partially on sophisticated “matching” formulas, leading to an age that could be more fair and equitable, but that might also produce monopolization and co-option in entirely new ways.

Introduction

One purpose of money is to distribute goods and labor. In the future, we will be able to solve these tasks differently, without money, instead relying on the help of networks, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Why do without money? The medium of money combines three functions: payment, value, and storage. In every money economy, the function of storage tends to overshadow the other functions. This tendency is unavoidable because it is inherent to money. The command “More!” is inscribed in it from the very start. The command drives toward a state in which all economic activity is forced to pay tribute. Each valuation of goods and professions shifts in favor of assets and their accumulation. Increasingly, income and property are distributed unequally. This should come as no surprise, since the measures taken by central banks after the crisis in 2008 were limited to the continuous salvaging of assets.

Designing a non-money economy would pose a fundamental utopia in opposition to the money economy. This economy would do without money, abolish the storage of value and assets, and replace the functions of value and payment with the algorithmically supported distribution of things and activities. Technically speaking, this is possible because all transactions are already digitally recorded and enough data can be calculated to enhance and replace the market’s information function. In this sense, the concept of the non-money economy represents a radical leftist utopia: an economy that strives toward equal economic distribution by changing the current system in a fundamental way, because it pertains to money’s nature as a medium.

(…)

1. Distribution

The task of the economy is to distribute money and labor. But money is not necessary for this task. Historically speaking, the medium of money came to be used to bundle necessary economic information and to communicate it. Today, almost the entire economy runs under a money regime. But neither the end of history nor an optimal solution for distribution has been achieved with this scenario. Since data and computers are now large and fast enough, we can envision alternative, moneyless, and probably better techniques of distribution. We need to begin with questions of distribution and allocation and not with markets and their monetary orientation.

The task of distributing many different things among many different participants represents a typical problem for networks, which is how to deal with a variety of connections. The core element of these connections is to form a social relation, be it through a gift or help or communication. Whenever something is distributed, a link is activated.

(…)

With the increasing amount and density of information, the relationship between prices changes radically. Prices only retroactively express what we already know about the behavior of consumers in the market. Whenever we book a flight, we can see how prices are set using algorithms. This data head-start applies not just to final consumers, but also to large sites of trading. Sporadic flash crashes show what happens when algorithms speculate on stocks and other securities.

When our profiles, our likes, and our consumer histories are used to calculate who will buy what and where, the entire market becomes condensed to a singular moment for each transaction—that is, if a profiling algorithm can determine the price one is willing to pay for a specific product at a given time and place, there exists exactly one marketplace for that sale. In that case the price of the item conveys no additional information outside of this single market. Formally speaking, distribution is still depicted in prices and calculated in terms of money, but data currents today already represent the technological foundation of a non-money economy.

(…)

2. Transactions

Transactions form the foundation of every economy. The simplest of all transactions is a gift. One person (A) gives something (x) to another person (B)—noted as a tuple (A, B, x). 1 The term “person” here refers to any kind of active agent, not just human beings, but also robots, programs, machines, or other living beings.

A gift is anything at all that can be given, not just commodities, but also information, events, access, actions, assistance, and the like. Giving, rather than labor, should be considered the foundation of economic relations, for the simple reason that one can indeed work without being part of the economy—that is, entirely for one’s own good and without any effect on others. In contrast, a transaction always represents a social relationship of some kind. This means that, with the division of labor, the foundational act is that of division, not labor. We need to take a closer look at what economic activity means. Labor is part of the money economy and relies on the concept of paid, productive activities. In a non-money field, the economic value of an activity would be decided by whether and how it is shared.

All formats and structures of giving and exchange, like payments, prices, values, purchasers, consumption, supply, demand, and markets, can be traced back to simple transactions. The entirety of all economic relationships can be understood through the elementary transaction of giving. The act of purchasing, today seen as something quite ordinary, emerged rather late in the long history of economic relationships and the advent of money. Previously, simple transactions were the rule: gifts, even forced ones, in the form of taxes, for example. Measuring and noting gifts in numeric form began not with money, but with systems of inscription that were usually linked to temples. All the stories of money that suggest the economy began with exchange are not just historically incorrect; they also refuse to recognize that an economy before money existed, and thus are not suited to conceive of an economy without money today.

(…)

3. Media and Networks 

Reaching the point when data can take over the tasks of money depends on the relationship of computing capacities to transactions. As soon as computer networks are large and fast enough to process all acts of payment, technically speaking it is possible to algorithmically emulate the function of money. We have now reached this very threshold, and are likely to cross it in the course of a few years.

As mentioned, economic forms without money are not entirely new. Before the rise of money, larger economic units were administered by systems of inscription. Their remains are not only found in the ruins of temples, but also in the myths of guilt or debt (Schuld) in many religions. In one of the most famous of all prayers, Christians demand, day in and day out, millions of times over, an end to all debt: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” But they have forgotten the economic core of these lines. With the shift from a centralized system of inscription to a decentralized one—i.e., using money—forgiving debts went out of fashion. This was no coincidence, for the many creditors who had taken the place of a central power were then more interested in collecting debts than in forgiving them. Christianity reacted by replacing debt with sin and replacing the forgiveness of debt with individual confession—that is, through a form of control.

Historically speaking, economic relationships did not begin with exchange and certainly not with payment. What came first was giving, helping, and lending. Property was unknown. In small village communities, memory was sufficient to keep track, more or less, of who gave what to whom.

It was only with the introduction of writing that larger economic units began to be organized over a longer term. Recordings of gifts and debts can be found at many excavation sites of ancient civilizations. Ultimately, the invention of writing can be traced back to such archives of gifts and tributes. Together with the first general medium and system of inscription, new economic units grew. The dominance of these economies of inscription, usually around temples and in cities, could expand as far as their power to collect tributes extended.

Money only came later. In a strictly technical sense, money is not a medium but a technique that uses all sorts of media to make notes transportable—and the process is read-only. For the economy, this meant that money was a fundamental innovation, for it converted the simple transaction of the gift into a symmetrical exchange. If somebody paid to acquire something, there was nothing left over. Nothing needed to be noted. Money saves data.

The expansion of money ran in parallel to war and expansive state forms that, with money’s help, established a cycle of taxes for paying and feeding soldiers.

By way of the circulation of goods and labor, a complex structure evolved of money-like forms of notation for payments and promises of payment, from the coin to the promissory note, from paper money to digital currencies.

In the end, we have returned to a system of inscription that not only notes all payments, but also constructs the wildest derivatives and wagers on promises of payment. But the fact that money condenses data is no longer of interest, since we are able to process enough data.

Peer-to-peer currencies and crypto-currencies are nothing fundamentally new to this system. Bitcoins are still a form of money, even if separated from a central institution. On the path towards the abolition of money, they merely represent a detour. The principle of payment itself is maintained by digital and peer-to-peer payment systems. They simply reproduce old money on the new-media foundation of a distributed network. This corresponds to the first step of a media transformation.

In media theory since Marshall McLuhan, it has been a commonplace to state that newly developed media are first used to reproduce old content. Media transformations often take place in two phases. First, there is a reproduction of the old in the new: in the case at hand, Bitcoin is the internet’s replication of money. Only in the second phase will it become clear what kind of new life the new medium can develop. This step is still to come for money. It will lie in the takeover of economic functions of money by way of intelligent networks.

The most important thing about peer-to-peer currencies is the architecture in the background, the so-called blockchain. This represents the foundation for a decentralized technique of administration by which transactions can be communicated anonymously and examined by anyone. The technique works for money just as well as for other moneyless and decentralized systems of notation. Therefore, the blockchain represents a possible building block for an economy after money.

The second phase of a media transformation applies to the question of how a moneyless economy can emerge and how it could replace money. But technological development leaves many possibilities open here. At issue is not a fixed, defined path that follows deterministically set media guidelines. Technological progress opens possibilities for future activities, in terms of the ecology of information affordances. As a rule, these are achieved by way of a chaotic process full of contradictions. What drives transformation are not plans or impact assessments but rather the misuse of possibilities, the counterculture, hacking, and taking advantage of mistakes and gaps. This applies to the non-money economy as well. We will not be able to plan it. It will emerge in the niches and obscure corners of various networks and spread from there.

(…)

4. Matching

Matching is an important operation in a money-less economy. It takes on functions that are otherwise controlled by prices and by the market. “To match” means to classify, assign, or link.

(…)

The process of matching serves to integrate all participants and their desires, needs, possibilities, and abilities. It offers to mediate between transactions, to advise participants in their decisions, to accompany negotiations, and to note the results.

Theories of algorithms and networks use the term matching to refer to every cross-classification of elements from two different sets. For our purposes, these elements can be things or people or events or points in time or locations or objects of any kind. Elements of the same set may be matched with one another—such as in the case of two people connected by a dating agency, a team of programmers brought together for the development of a project, or trucks or containers coordinated for shipping purposes.

Formally, in a network-based environment, matching performs a gift based on conditional constraints. The result of a match can be described as the difference between before and after, whereby each matched transaction has effects beyond all immediate participants, no matter how small. The environment encompasses all links and information that go into the matching, that are processed along the way, and that are noted in the final conclusion. In the process, all decisions made along the way are accounted for, both on the giving side and the taking side, on the side of the good itself that is given, and on the side of the affected third party. The factors that go into making a match include comparable transactions, the history of transactions in the participants’ profiles, and the participants’ desires, needs, and capacities.

Matching processes all of these parameters to suggest one or several possible solutions. The function is not that of an auctioneer, but of a mediator. This means that it is not the goal to calculate the best solution for an ideal price and to leave things at that, but to communicate among a series of interests. Matching is scaled depending on need. Not all options have to be taken. When it comes to daily use, matching would become a formality and take less time than paying does today. If matching were to be applied to a more extensive political process, it would affect all the committees, authorities, and interested parties involved, and would thus unfold similarly.

(…)

Matching procedures would make suggestions on the path towards a decision, show opportunities, and accompany the process of negotiation. It might well be the case that the algorithm becomes active before we even think of wanting something particular. Some suggestive apps already do this, by evaluating our desires and predicting them. Whether we want this influence or not is perhaps a hypothetical question. The more advantages people see in algorithms, the more they will take recourse to them. In this way, socially recognized patterns of behavior arise all on their own. The future, present, and past of media transformations are never foundationally subject to social intention, but driven by a technological dynamics all their own.

(…)

Seen from the users’ perspective, every process of matching begins with a desire or a need. The algorithm then suggests various solutions. If one of them fits, the other participants—producers, suppliers, inventors, machines, or algorithms—are contacted. If an agreement is reached, the transaction is carried out and noted. The impulse to make a match can emerge from each of the four participating sides: from those interested, from those offering, from the product itself, or from the algorithm. Most steps in a match are basically familiar to us already. We carry them out all the time, looking for something online or offering and selling something of our own.

The matching process encompasses an entire bundle of functions around a transaction. Whether these functions are encounters in a unified framework or are divided among a variety of apps is of no relevance in terms of a currency-less economy. The decisive feature is that matching does not operate with money, but organizes distribution directly. This also means that transactions are noted and stored, but not valued with fixed prices and calculated as such.

Matching is also omnipresent within an economy like the current one that operates with money. When we buy things or somebody pays us for our labor, matching is also taking place. But this usually follows different rules than it would in a moneyless world. Without money, the selection criterion of simple and one-dimensional value would fall by the wayside. Instead, an entire series of various decision-making factors become available.

Consider for a moment how matching works under conditions of money. Let’s say we go into a store and purchase something. The product already has a history behind it. Somebody designed it, others made it, and the store has it in its assortment because it could count on customers like us. Our purchase is thus preceded by several decisions that are all linked to the exchange of information. But before we take the product and pay for it, we undergo a more or less intense process of deliberation: weighing the costs, our budget, our desires, and our needs. This internalized matching can take place in very different ways depending on the person and the situation. Some have to consider every single cent they spend, whereas others are largely free of this concern. In a moneyless economy, there is no guarantee that all will be freed of such concerns.

There will continue to be unfulfilled—and unfulfillable—wishes. Even in an economy without money, we won’t be able to possess all that is denied us under a regime of money. Only the conditions and procedures will change, fundamentally, and for the better.

Whether with or without money, our personal decisions are integrated into a broader cycle of information. In today’s economy, a purchase sends the information that more of the same product is needed. It combines with similar information at the point of sale and reaches the producer from there. Parallel to the flow of money and payment, there is always a second current of information that controls how paths of production are organized and goods are distributed. Matching without money would dock directly onto this secondary flow of information.

1. In mathematics a tuple is a finite ordered list.

Translated from the German by Brian Currid.

This excerpt is part of the transmediale journal – face value edition. You can buy a print copy here.

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Consider how odd this is: the demand for goods is used as a proxy for the relative accessibility of non-renewable resources — yet the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels isn’t showing up in the price we pay at the gas pump. Same with water and rare minerals, which are not valued according to their declining availability. Nor does eco-value appear on the spreadsheets of most stock traders, insurance companies or other businesses.

What’s causing such rampant misreporting and misallocation? I’ve come to see this now as more a problem of accountability than accounting. Frankly, the challenge is to admit our mistakes and reconceptualize the modern system of economic valuation, starting with the theory that it’s based on a fundamental law of equilibrium. Take, for example, Adam Smith’s idea that the efforts of individuals in pursuing their own interests naturally benefit society, or the notion that an organic circular flow exists between market prices and people’s incomes. Are these assumptions valid? And what do we mean by economic balance? Is it a principle of physics or biology?

Let’s begin by asking, is supply and demand truly able to manage the thresholds of resources which an environment can sustain, or to ensure that these resources are allocated sufficiently for the population living in that environment?

In both classical and Keynesian economics, the ratio between the supply of a quantity of a good or service and the demand for it is determined by the price of this quantity. What is tallied on the supply-side of this equation are production costs, which include labor, capital, expectations of future prices and suppliers, and the technology that’s used in production. The relative availability of materials and energy for production is also listed as a supply cost, although seldom in ecological terms. The rate at which people and their organizations may harvest or use a particular resource within its regenerative capacity is not normally registered on the supply side as an ecological yield, but as a financial outlay. Nor are the negative effects of pollution, waste, ill-health or risk typically included in production costs.

Conversely, the demand side of the market economy measures consumer income, tastes and preferences, prices of related goods and services, expectations about future prices and incomes, and the number of potential consumers. Rather than reflect actual human need, demand is a measure of individual consumption at the point of sale. It’s simply the price at which a person is willing to pay for something, signifying how much cash or credit is exchanged in the transaction. But what’s not measured by demand is the individual’s accessibility to breathable air, clean water, nutritious food, adequate shelter, or meaningful security, love, belonging and inclusion. Subjective expressions of need, beauty, volunteer labor, loss of commons or health and safety risks are simply not involved in the transmission of demand through the cash register, barcode scanner or wireless purchase.

A similar structure for market equilibrium is applied in banking and finance. Just as the supply-demand formula in microeconomics is based on a functional connection between producers and consumers, the supply-demand ledger is used in macroeconomics to express a similar type of relationship between lenders and borrowers. Here, the equilibrium between the money supply and the demand for money is adjusted through an interest rate, which represents the price that is charged for money.

Once again, this represents a certain kind of transactional balance within the marketplace, but does not reflect the broader relationship between the ecology and its population. When all that’s expressed in the standard supply-demand equation is the price of a particular commodity or good, or an interest rate which signifies the price of money, neither resource preservation and replenishment rates nor specific measures of the human need for this resource are accounted. Nor does the supply-demand equation convey the underlying costs of social harm or environmental damage that may be incurred.

This disequilibrium in value has also led to deep political biases in how the supply-demand model should be applied in society. On one hand, classical and neo-classical economists say that ‘supply creates its own demand’. They promote strong policies for investment and production through individual initiative and limited government intervention in the economy, while rationalizing endless resource extraction, production, growth and waste. In using supply-demand for their scale of balance, these analysts rarely question why the exponential values in the economy are so disjointed from the biological growth rates which occur in the natural world.

On the other hand, Keynesian economists say that boosting wages and purchasing power generates demand. They promote policies of shared investment and production through intervention by a government in its economy, while ignoring the destructive competition which this creates between available resources and the needs of a population for these resources. Here, Keynesians are little different than classical economists: both schools assume that meeting human needs is dependent on extractive production, expanding population, continuous demand, increasing personal income, rising consumption and the unintended but inevitable byproducts of manufactured pollution and disposable waste.

Neither choice is correct because the basic theory of market equilibrium ignores environmental and social costs, deeply misinterpreting the dynamic link between ecological support systems and the people who depend on them. This vital connection is seen simply as a ‘supply chain’ through which a quantity of something demanded by consumers or borrowers is delivered to them based on the quantity that firms or banks can supply. Neither the classical or Keynesian approaches to supply and demand reflect the constraints to the productive capacity of Earth’s resource base or the maximum size of a population which can be maintained indefinitely within that environment.

Our economic proxies for environmental balance are directly to blame for these fateful miscalculations. As a subsystem of a larger ecosystem, the supply-demand model does little to equalize the natural sources of productive input with the natural sinks of consumed output or waste, leading to massive market failure. Under the illusion of supply-demand equilibrium, human population is now using the basic resources of food, water, energy and minerals faster than Nature can replenish them to meet the needs of its people. To reverse this critical overshoot, we’ll have to transform our epistemology, our ideologies, our institutions and rules, as well as our methods of accounting.

All of this requires a clearer understanding of the interactions between the biosphere and human society. The ecological threshold of available resources and the allocations of those resources to meet the needs of a population are actually opposing forces which continuously counteract one another. This dynamic principle exists between every species and its environment: living organisms react to changes in their ecosystem and make adjustments to survive.

Through this constant interplay between natural and physical forces, instead of supply creating its own demand through prices or demand being dependent on income, the signaling of need by an organism routinely triggers the creation of its own supply. These self-regulating forces work in Nature and within the biology of the human body; they must also work in human societies. Measuring the replenishment of renewable and non-renewable resources will enable a society to sustain their yield relative to the offsetting needs demonstrated by the size and growth of the human population.

These divergent forces must be given an empirical basis in socioeconomic policy beyond the inept framework of supply-demand. Counterbalancing the needs of a population with its resource support systems requires a major readjustment. Here’s how this might work. What’s now included on the supply side as extraction, production and waste is redefined as the self-organization of resources within the ecological limits of the planet for their regeneration. And what’s now reported on the demand side as a measure of income is redefined as the  of people in meeting their daily requirements through the common use of these resources.

When supply becomes an ecological value and demand becomes the value of human need, ‘build it and they will come’ is transformed into ‘demonstrate the need and it is met’. Now, instead of a crude approximation for economic equilibrium, we have an actual measure for the cooperative activities of people managing their resources to meet their needs — a measure based on the level of regenerative output which their ecology can optimally ‘carry’ or sustain.

The term for this dynamic equilibrium between people and their environment, which points the way out of our supply-demand matrix, is biocapacity. Biocapacity expresses the intrinsic value of sustainability within an ecosystem. It is based on the thresholds of resources which can be sustained in an environment as measured against the allocations of resources sufficient to meet the needs of its population. Through this ecosystem value, biocapacity offers direct indicators and guidelines to help us organize our own sufficiency through the steadily fluctuating, self-adjusting metabolism of society as a living system.

Note: James Quilligan presented these comments at the Global Thresholds and Allocations Council (GTAC) Kickoff Meeting at the Royal Dutch Federation of Accountants in Amsterdam, convened by Reporting 3.0 on 31 January 2018, in a session on Allocation Approaches with fellow speaker Mark McElroy of the Center for Sustainable Organizations, moderated by Bill Baue of Reporting 3.0. The 35+ global experts gathered at the meeting sat in rapt attention while James spoke, and broke into spontaneous applause when he finished. Please see the GTAC Landing Page on the Reporting 3.0 website for links to the GTAC Concept Note, Meeting Presentation Deck, and Meeting Program (with abstracts by all speakers, including GRI Co-Founder Allen White, Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Doughnut Economic author Kate Raworth, Future Fit Foundation CEO Geoff Kendall, International Integrated Reporting Council Managing Director Neil Stevenson, and many others.)

This article was first published in Sustainable Brands.

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