SMART Futures for a Flourishing World

Book excerpt: Has the COVID-19 pandemic derailed the global community’s commitment to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? Are we heading for environmental collapse? Can we avert a climate catastrophe and enable peace, justice, and shared futures for humanity? These questions call for transformational change. This book explores the root causes of today’s failures and lays out a plan for real-world innovation labs using a SMART future design paradigm to achieve the UN’s 17 sustainability goals and 169 targets. SMART futures is a ‘systems literacy’ approach to problem solving that allows us to address challenges of our VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world as an integrated whole. This new paradigm shifts us from silo thinking to systems thinking. With lively storytelling and thought-provoking analysis, Dr. Claire Nelson opens a doorway to the future, and a vision of what success might look like. Her stories from the future present worldviews of the feminine and from the global South, which are often absent from contemporary global futures discourse.