DR. ELIZABETH SAWIN

Available November 26, 2024

Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World

Use code MULTI at checkout for 20% off

About the Book

For most of Elizabeth Sawin’s career, she was not a multisolver. Instead, she worked on a single, albeit immensely important problem: climate change. Despite tremendous effort—long hours of teaching, attending conferences, publicizing analysis—at the end of the day, she felt like she was chasing her tail. Unless people began to recognize the multitude of unexpected benefits from ratcheting down emissions, climate change would remain a losing political issue.

That experience, along with the guidance of leaders in systems thinking and racial justice, convinced her that the world’s thorniest problems may be easier to tackle together than one by one. That’s multisolving: using a single investment of time or money to solve many problems at the same time. (Reduced fossil fuel use = improvements in climate, health, equity, economics, and more.) While the idea of killing two birds with one stone (or “filling two needs with one deed”) is age-old, and the notion of co-benefits in policy-making has been around for years, Multisolving addresses the current mismatch between complex, deeply intertwined societal issues and our siloed approach to them.

This unique resource is for local school boards that need revenue for their students but don’t want to overtax low-income seniors. It is for nonprofits working to reduce food waste and combat the root causes of hunger while increasing racial justice. It is for seaside communities that can protect themselves from flooding while also improving biodiversity with a living coastline. It may also be for you: doing the work you know is imperative but that is sometimes overwhelming, a tiny a drop in a swirling ocean.

Multisolving can’t promise a list of “fifty simple things to make everything OK.” What it does offer are strategies to build solidarity between diverse groups, overcome powerful interests, and create last change that benefits us all.

Reviews

Multisolving is essential reading for anyone seeking to be a node of possibility in our troubled yet beautiful world. Beth Sawin shares a lifetime of learning about systems with clarity and care. A true companion for the path ahead.

- Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save and lead writer of Drawdown

Feeling helpless at the scale of the polycrisis we face and wondering how to address everything everywhere all at once? This book is for you! Infused with ambition, courage, hope and assurance rising from experience, it shows us how we can solve multiple problems through simple systems-based solutions.

- Director, Loka Initiative, University of Wisconsin – Madison

Efforts to halt the cascading crises of our times often trade one trouble for another. However, systems thinking helps us see where a single action can address two or more problems at once. Never has “multisolving” been more needed. A brilliant, timely book!

- Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute

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