When a company's operations are sustainable, they cause minimal or no harm to the environment, climate and society. Regenerative practices take the action one step further. They aim to renew and improve both the environment and society. They don’t just restore but make the system better than it was.
“Regenerative business increases both the vitality of nature and the social vitality of societies,” says Professor Juha Väätänen from LUT Business School.
Regenerative practices are more recent than sustainability. Väätänen explains that they are basically at the same stage of their life cycle as sustainable development was in 2012.
"In 13 years, the world has embraced sustainability in all aspects of life. I believe the same will happen with regeneration.”
Patagonia and Järki Särki are examples of regenerative business
As a prime example of a long-term regenerative business, Väätänen highlights Patagonia. Founded in 1973, the American company manufactures outdoor clothing, equipment and food.
Patagonia is widely regarded as a pioneer in regenerative business and sustainable development in the business world. For example, the company recycles raw materials, encourages its customers to repair their clothes and equipment, and has built its own subcontracting chain that only uses sustainably or regeneratively produced raw materials.
“Patagonia is also a good example because it is a large company. As a company, they clearly have the will to do things differently, which is why they have also developed profitable solutions for it.”
Of the smaller companies, Väätänen highlights the Finnish company Järki Särki, whose regenerative nature has been studied by Professor Laura Albareda of the LUT Business School together with Professor Oana Branzei of the Ivey Business School.
Järki Särki is known for its canned roach product. As a so-called rough fish, roach has a negative impact on the local ecosystems. Removing it from waterways is therefore a regenerative practice.
“Many regenerative companies are small and primarily affect the local ecosystem and context. I believe that in the future, even more local innovations not be scalable to a larger scale will emerge.”
What do regenerativity and resilience mean?
- Sustainability – Sustainable operations cause as little or no harm to the environment, climate and society as possible.
- Regenerative practices – Improve and build the environment, climate and society.
- Resilience – A term that describes the resilience of a system, society or individual to shock and change. It can also refer to a system’s ability to return to its so-called normal state after disturbances.
- Restorative practices – Restore the environment, climate and society to the extent that the activities have previously caused harm to them.
Resilience is a complex concept
Alongside regenerative practices, concepts of restorative practices and resilience and often raised. Restorative practices refer to restoring degraded habitats, such as wetlands and peat fields, for instance.
Resilience, on the other hand, is a term that describes a characteristic instead of a practice. Paavo Tertsunen, who studies resilience of infrastructures in his doctoral dissertation at LUT, says that resilience means simply a system’s speed of recovery.
“In this case, we assume that the system has a normal state. Resilience describes its speed or ability to return to its normal state after disruptions and changes. This kind of thinking can also be criticized, because the assumption of a normal state is restrictive. In fact, systems that are under pressure to change also renew and evolve over time.”
Tertsunen highlights ecologist C. S. Holling's well-known definition, according to which resilience describes the permanence of the system's relationships and its ability to absorb or tolerate changes. It is seen more as flexibility: how much pressure the system can withstand before it is forced to move to a new state.
In addition to his doctoral research, Tertsunen works as an expert at the National Emergency Supply Agency. His doctoral research is supervised by Associate Professor Antti Silvast, who received funding from the LUT Doctoral School, and Professor Simone Abram from Durham University. Durham University has recently been ranked among the top five universities in the UK and one hundred of the best universities worldwide.
Is our society already too resilient?
Regenerative practices are always sustainable, but sustainable practices are often not regenerative. In the same way, both regenerative and sustainable systems and practices can be highly resilient, especially in the long term, but resilient systems are not automatically sustainable, let alone regenerative.
It would be good to consider whether our system is even so stable that it is difficult or impossible to change it, even though we have the need and desire.
“Our society is resilient in both good and bad ways. We are still able to live a normal life, even though the last few years have been eventful, to say the least. It would be good to consider whether our system is even so stable that it is difficult or impossible to change it, even though we have the need and desire to change,” Tertsunen points out.
He emphasizes that when building a sustainable society for the future, these three properties of systems – regenerative, restorative and resilient – should be utilised together. This, in turn, may require us to look at infrastructures in a more diverse way, as Tertsunen does in his doctoral dissertation.
People are always behind the change
Alongside the systems, also people are a part of change. People themselves are resilient, but people’s operations also build the resilience of different systems. Human activity is also at the heart of sustainability and regenerative practices.
Juha Väätänen talks about change agents, who can be described as business activists. They strongly drive change within companies.
A concrete example of a change agent is the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard. When he noticed that his company was successful, he also recognized that through Patagonia he had an opportunity to influence topics important to him. Chouinard has also stated that despite its growth, Patagonia will remain faithful to its original values. The idea of building a better world has been instilled in the company on the strategy level.
“In multinational companies, the group of owners is often spread out. That is why change requires change agents who can start trying out new ways of doing things,” Väätänen says.
The political system is often slow to intervene and has no global power to change things. This is why companies are often pioneers of change.
“Especially entrepreneurs who create something new. They can solve things quickly and in a new way.”
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