Last Stage 1 Workshop & Your Personal Productivity Defined

Hi there,

We had our final workshop for this stage of the project last Saturday. Thanks to everyone who turned up to help. Once more, it was a great event.

It’s interesting to hear little indications from you about how the program is evolving. The questions we are getting now are definitely tougher and show a high degree of understanding of where this process is heading. I can’t stress enough how ground-breaking this approach is. It also shows the capacity we all have to understand complex systems processes and will, ultimately, reveal to our government how much value they can get from this different style of engagement.

It’s very gratifying and makes it all worthwhile.

Doing the Cultural Ecosystem Services and Values work for a remaining 20 or so Features.

What happens next

We are going to be busy stitching all these data together for a while now and developing the first working version of the model. Our next public meetings will be about presenting this back to you and working out what else we need to think about, to make the model emulate the current conditions our Bay is facing (once it recreates current conditions, we can use it to forecast changes we might want to make as a community).

This is where we are at now. We’re coming to the end of Stage 1 and moving into Stage 2 of the project.

Emerging Properties of a System

One thing I did wish to mention was an emerging theme from the surveys. Last week we went through the online data and it is very clear that ‘safety and security’, ‘sense of peacefulness’ and ‘clean living environment’ are overwhelming drivers of our environmental productivity. These are factors that have never been incorporated into Ecosystem Based Management in Port Phillip Bay.

Throughout this program we do not presume to guess what our community thinks. This is an example of how the process enables learning and reveals properties we weren’t previously aware of. The next post you receive will be about how this works and why we cannot afford to make guesses before talking to communities about how our environment works.

How does our personal productivity relate to the economy and decisions we make

Everything we are currently measuring with you, combines into a knowledge system that represents the proportion of our economy that depends on your productivity and how much of that comes from being in nature. As we discussed in this recent post, our community is capable of estimating matters like this by using crowd wisdom.

We recently asked 85 people in two different forums, to estimate: ‘the percentage of personal productivity that depends on going to places you love, to seek life balance, in a healthy ecosystem?’

The result was 55%.

The percentage of personal productivity that people estimate depends on going to the places they love, to seek life balance, in a healthy ecosystem.

This makes quite a bit of sense when you realise that more than half the world's GDP (USD 44 trillion) is dependent on nature and the services it provides.

It also indicates something else.

Every decision we’ve currently been making about looking after our Bay, might have been made without considering over half of the economic drivers. If that’s the case, how can we ever be sure our decisions are either ecologically or economically sound?

We’re about to change that and the contribution you’ve made so far, is an enormous step in this direction.