2021. We live in a world of increased instabilities and threats: climate crisis increasingly shows its devastating consequences, power shifts and instable governments show that social uproar is lurking, and our economy is at stake taken down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The world is changing, and anxiety is rising. Besides obvious threats caused by environmental changes or political chaos, there is a danger we see growing at the turn of this century: humanity feels threatened by machines, and fears losing its relevance in a world disrupted by the ever-growing power of robots and AI.
Over the past 20 years, we have seen considerable interest from businesses and universities in the creation of sustainable organizations which should have the capacity to endure and meet simultaneously a triple objective of economic, environmental and human performance.
Yet, compared to the environmental and economic dimensions of sustainability, the human dimension of sustainability has received much less attention so far.
THE SWISS CENTER FOR POSITIVE FUTURES
At the core of this shift there are humans and their needs, their dreams, and their capabilities to reach for their Positive Futures.
The Swiss Center for Positive Futures is the University’s futures thinking nexus, where to create foresight methods, generate images of the future, and develop tools for decision making and guidelines for capacity building.
WHY IT MATTERS
Human sustainability encompasses the development of skills and human capacity to support the functions and sustainability of the organization and to promote the well-being of communities and society.
The Digital Transition is well on its way.
The Environmental Transition is urgently needed.
Yet neither of them will be successful without a Human Transition toward more Human Sustainability.
Digital investments are useless without human innovation and application capacities. Green strategies are useless without environmental awareness and skills. In a society where work is a pillar of individual fulfillment, social organization, stability and security, we believe that the current disrupting trends impacting the working landscape and the resulting Human Skills Obsolescence represents a severe national security threat.
