Repeatability Across Generations
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This document presents Repeatability Across Generations as a physically and institutionally grounded framework for long-term stewardship and resource management, designed to assess whether energy systems, infrastructures, data centres, industrial development pathways and business models can be maintained and repeated over 100–500 years within ecological, material and energy boundaries. The starting point is that today’s societies are, in practice, operating two non-green energy systems in parallel: an established, relatively low-material-intensity system with its main waste flow in the atmosphere, and a rapidly expanding mineral-based system with geological waste flows in the form of tailings, waste rock, chemical residual flows and long-lived pollution. The document is structured around three central questions: binding municipal influence, Repeatability Across Generations and reform of the Companies Act. Binding municipal influence is treated as a democratic safety valve where land, water, landscapes and living environments are at stake. Repeatability Across Generations is formulated as a long-term test of whether projects, technologies and systems can be carried, maintained and repeated across several generations. Reform of the Companies Act is treated as necessary in order for the profit motive to be explicitly subordinated to binding ecological and material boundaries. Sufficiency thereby emerges as the material direction towards which the assessment points: the total throughput of energy and materials must decrease if society is to remain within the boundaries of the biosphere over time. The document addresses, among other things, biodiversity, freshwater, declining ore grades, critical and strategic minerals, the CRMA and other EU-related policy instruments, AI data centres, the consequences of the emerging high-tech society and corporate responsibility. All of this leads back to the question of Repeatability Across Generations. The document does not take a position for one technology or against another. It asks the same question of all technologies, projects and systems: can they be carried, maintained and repeated across generations without depleting resources, damaging freshwater, undermining biodiversity or leaving behind long-lived waste flows? The document can be used as a basis for analysis, public education and local or municipal assessment of projects related to energy, raw materials and industrial development. This publication is also accompanied by the conversation guide Suggested format for a conversation on Repeatability Across Generations, which provides a suggested routine and format for a conversation, discussion meeting or study circle on the questions raised by the document: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20381225 The Swedish version is available here: Upprepbarhet över Generationer: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18854430
Author: Backlund, Ivar
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7123556782
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