This session will address the make-or-break crossroads that our sustainability practice faces, three emerging innovations that create the potential for sustainability success in time, and the programmatic implications for our GeoDesign community and practice. The session will use examples from San Francisco's sustainability planning and GIS-based growth policy program, including 3D GIS & ArcGIS Urban. Our sustainability practice is at a crossroads: shift to an effective approach that can scale quickly enough or fail. Under a business and sustainability planning as usual scenario, we face increasingly hostile socioeconomic conditions from accelerating climate change and collapse by end of century if we don't reverse course while simultaneously increasing economic production by factors of 5x-10x to meet the needs the world's existing and growth population, all with net positive environmental impact! A small order. Our present sustainability-as-usual approach is siloed, incremental, linear, and cannot scale quickly enough. It only perpetuates accelerating unsustainability, albeit with smaller incremental effect, by using the same concepts that created the problems in the first place in available, practical, feasible solutions without addressing the root cause. Fortunately, innovation across our plan, design, and build professions, and in the economy more generally, are generating the ingredients for success. The first emerging innovation is the new emerging practice of regenerative systems sustainability. The second is socioeconomic 3D spatial modeling, such as ArcGIS Urban, Pro, CityEngine, and UnrealEngineVR. They create the capacity for the new practice of urban and regional systems planning, design, and management. The third innovation is development of sustainability planning, policy, and problem-solving infrastructure, such as community & regional GIS, global GIS sensing & reacting infrastructure, CA SB375 every-four-year regional climate and sustainability planning update in every CA region, and finally, the UN Habitat III global SDG implementation program. Connecting these three nascent, emerging arenas of innovation creates the potent potential for substantive sustainability success in time. How to do it is our challenge. The necessary first step is recognizing the problem, the challenge, the requirements for success, and the powerful nature of these three threads of societal innovation. Realizing their potential will require a deliberate R&D program across many organizations and individuals. This presentation will sketch the high-level connections and illustrate technology applications to understand the opportunity before us, the big value it has, and how to generate it.

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