APres™
How can a business grow inside planetary boundaries?
APres 1.0 · forthcoming in Absolute Sustainability
Seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been breached, and efficiency programmes have not turned that around. APres takes the central insight of ecological economics, that an economy must be sized to the ecosystem it sits in, down to the level where strategy is made, the single business, and replaces eco-efficiency's relative gains with a test against fixed physical limits.
The method in brief
Most corporate sustainability work measures progress against the firm's past: less carbon, less waste, less water than last year. In a growing market, those savings are spent again on more output, and total pressure on the Earth system keeps rising. Reducing impact is necessary. On its own, it cannot hold a business inside a limit.
APres, the Adaptive Planetary Resilience Exchange System, starts from the planetary boundaries instead. It turns each global boundary into a limit a single business can evaluate against now, and gives it the tools to redesign or improve a value proposition or business model that falls short.
The framework has five parts:
- A canvas for designing business models and testing them against planetary limits, which also serves as a step-by-step method.
- Seven principles, including the infinity test. Assume demand for an offer is unlimited. What would that do to the planet? A design passes when it caps its harm, and with it what can be sold.
- A control vector that limits throughput to what the system can bear.
- An evaluation system that scores a value proposition against fixed limits, not against a moving baseline.
- A strategy matrix that sets out the options for reducing a firm's vulnerability and securing the natural stocks it relies on.
Where pathway-based target setting commits a firm to a future trajectory, APres tests what it does now against the limit, and the strategic formulation follows from the result. Boundaries are tested at the scale where the pressure occurs, in the places a value chain draws on.
The principle behind all five: first set what must remain of a natural stock, then size use to it.
Who it is for
- Business leaders, chief sustainability officers and entrepreneurs who want to support sustainable value creation and need a way to evaluate value propositions against fixed limits, not against last year.
- Policy makers and researchers will find the full method a useful frame of reference to build from.
The book behind the method
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