VU Amsterdam at the Osaka World Expo 2025

Global and local sustainability challenges 

The world and its population face significant global environmental sustainability challenges, including climate change, economic inequality, food and water insecurity, mass migration stress, refugee crises, plastic soup dangers, and biodiversity collapse. Moreover, we face more local challenges threatening the social sustainability of our society, such as untapped human potential, burnout, individualism, fear-based decision-making, exclusion, lack of community involvement, top-down governance, and a diminished sense of shared responsibility. For climate change, for instance, focus is mainly on reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs) through ideation and implementation of new research and technologies. The required social innovation to implement these technologies for impact is seen as an implied task, which is highly inefficient and puts unendurable burdens on already overstrained humans in our encumbered society.

The urgent need for a paradigm shift 

To circumvent the unavoidable negative consequences of the above-mentioned undesired changes, we need a paradigm shift. Currently, modern society and developed economy can be called a ‘wellbeing society and economy’; a society and economy in which we strive to have (most often one-size-fits-all) solutions for all our problems with ‘wellbeing for people and planet’ as the desired end state. We often tend to forget that this perfect world needs to be broadened, built, experienced, and continuously developed by human beings, and that their wellbeing can be a starting point instead of just an end result, as well.

Wellbeing as a catalyst for transformation 

Wellbeing, not just as the ultimate end state, but as an optimal starting point and catalyst can have a crucial impact on reverting the devastating consequences of critical threats. Optimal wellbeing to start with, leading to unleashing full human potential, can enable the necessary resilience for and openness to change and capacity to create solutions to circumvent increased workload, fatigue, and burnout, and by this support smoother and faster implementation of the required large-scale transitions and even more wellbeing for more people on a global scale. Sustainably building and maintaining wellbeing and unleashing human potential calls for a paradigm shift where we strive for a society based on wellbeing instead of holding on to a wellbeing society ambition approach.