1.4 Regenerative economies

Human beings, like all other organisms on Earth, must live in balance with nature to survive and thrive. Understanding how nature works can help us design our economies to regenerate social and ecological systems rather than degenerate them as they do now. This section outlines some essential patterns in nature and then discusses how we can design regenerative economies to be  circular, distributive, and caring.

A sustainable world already exists, we are now just beginning to open our eyes and realise that the answers to the questions we've been asking -- how do we live here sustainably? -- are all around us.

-- Janine Beynus, biomimicry expert

At the end of this Subtopic 1.4 Regenerative economies, you should be able to:

• describe the Unifying Patterns of Nature that support regenerative economic design

• explain the three principles of a circular economy, and how they apply to the biological and technical cycles with examples

• discuss the benefits and limitations of circular economy strategies

• explain the connections between economic inequality and ecological overshoot

• discuss the role of distributive design to support regenerative economic practices in markets and the state

• discuss the barriers to distributive economic design

• describe the characteristics of caring economies

• discuss how the 5 Rs (recognise, reduce, redistribute, represent and reward) can support transition to more caring economies

• discuss barriers to caring economy strategies