SENSOR 2026 June

What sprouts despite the exhaustion

By Pedro Sáez Martínez · June 2026 · SENSOR #2

Already halfway through the year, and you can probably already feel that work exhaustion. That dip in the capacity (and the appetite) to pay attention.

When I sit down to look at the month’s landscape, I see a contradiction… We have so many signals pointing toward certain transformations (social, ecological…), and so little energy to give them the attention they deserve.

The ground from which change has to sprout — our attention, our trust, the knowledge we share — keeps cracking. And still, there are signals of change (and of hope?).

From the Mar Menor (an entire natural ecosystem, the largest saltwater lagoon in Europe) taking the stand before a court, through Scotland turning community wealth into a legal obligation, to the Pope putting a moral brake on AI.

Even when we’re not paying attention, some shoots keep germinating. If you have a moment, I invite you to stop and observe them.

Signal panel — #sensor June 2026

This month, we’re opening the conversation with three concrete signals, out of the whole panel. If you feel some other signal is being left in the inkwell… let us know!

Signals of change in early June

Present and absent: from work to the digital realm

This year’s Gallup report tells us that only one in five workers worldwide is emotionally connected to their job. That’s the lowest level since the COVID lockdowns. They’ve christened it The Great Detachment: people stay at the company (the market’s in no mood for taking risks and leaving) but disconnect on the inside.

In parallel, researcher Gloria Mark has spent two decades measuring how our sustained attention on screen has collapsed: from two and a half minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today. Maybe the attention we need to give to screens, stimuli, decisions to make… just keeps growing, and our brains can’t take any more.

On the other hand, AI came bearing the promise of taking work off our plate by boosting productivity. And yet it seems to be adding to those stimuli and to the volume of decisions we have to make. BCG and HBR document what they call “AI Brain Fry”: mental fog, headaches, and slower decisions in those juggling several AI systems at once. The truth is that AI widens our “sphere of responsibility”: more outputs to supervise, more information to digest… in the same amount of time. On top of the social expectation to produce more, on the premise (and the promise) that AI would help us.

The Mar Menor: the lagoon that speaks in a courtroom

On 21 May, at the Provincial Court of Cartagena, the Mar Menor appeared as victim and private plaintiff in a criminal case. A natural ecosystem, with a voice of its own.

This lagoon, with legal personhood recognised thanks to a citizen-led legislative initiative (Iniciativa Legislativa Popular) of more than 600,000 signatures, sat in the dock facing the entities responsible for harming it. It’s the first time this has happened in Europe, and it’s a magnificent example of Life-Centered (or “more-than-human“) design: bringing other living, non-human beings into the conversation, giving them the space to speak and defend themselves. And designing with them.

And meanwhile… the climate is still up for debate

In March, the models gave a 22% chance of a super El Niño this year. By late April, 80%. In May, the ECMWF moved the needle to 100%. The super El Niño will form before November, and the ocean data point to an intensity not seen, perhaps, since the super El Niño of 1877. The scenario this could bring us means extreme droughts in Asia and Africa, floods in South America, fire in the Amazon…

And yet, at the very same time, the climate narrative takes a turn in another direction. In April the RCP8.5 — the worst climate scenario — was officially retired as implausible. The correction, legitimate and healthy within science, was immediately captured by certain institutional and social sectors to proclaim that climate change had been “exaggerated.” The ocean and the public debate seem to run at different rhythms. In any case, the same scientific group that proposed retiring the worst-possible, high-emissions scenario (RCP8.5) also acknowledged that the mid-emissions scenarios are, in any event, dangerous for humanity.

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The underlying patterns

The sustainability narrative takes the stand too

There’s a pattern connecting the Omnibus, the ECGT, the ESG crisis and the RCP8.5 war: we’re talking about the narrative around Sustainability. While corporate reporting is loosened, consumer communication is regulated hard, and the very tools of scientific knowledge become a battlefield. All at once.

The ECGT bans flimsily justified “eco” claims. The RCP8.5 update is turned into a media weapon by certain sectors. Do both signals point to a climate narrative that needs to temper itself and seek moderation? Neither built on vague (and inflated) claims, nor on extreme climate scenarios.

Maybe it’s the time for value propositions built on verifiable evidence, with precision — but also for narratives that show positive futures. Are we designing stories and brand promises that hold up under that scrutiny?

A double-edged sword

AI is presented as a solution to the climate crisis while being one of the biggest new sources of energy demand (in Ireland, data centres are heading toward 32% of national electricity).

It’s presented as a productivity lever while generating documented cognitive exhaustion.

And it’s deployed as organisational transformation… even though its accounting doesn’t quite add up: Uber burned through its annual AI coding budget in four months, and Microsoft cancelled a coding tool’s licences across an entire division to consolidate spend on its own. It seems the promises of productivity and economic growth are stalling.

And meanwhile, Pope Leo XIV launches a crusade against these technologies, comparing them to the mythical Tower of Babel. His Magnifica Humanitas is addressed to 1.4 billion Catholics “and to every person of good will,” and was presented alongside one of Anthropic’s co-founders.

Maybe, like the climate narratives, expectations about AI-driven disruptive transformations ought to be tempered.

Nature, pressing on the economy

Gone are the years when caring for nature was a matter of ethics and responsibility.

The UNEP puts a number on the wound in its State of Finance for Nature report: the world channels some $7.3 trillion a year into activities that damage nature — harmful public subsidies and extractive private investment — against barely $220 billion that goes to protecting or restoring it. That’s roughly 30 destructive dollars for every dollar that cares for it. And yet that same wound is changing its language: the UNEP already speaks of a “nature transition economy” as a latent trillion-dollar market. Triodos, with Canada’s Fondaction, launches the first fund that operates biodiversity as an asset class — not as a positive externality, but as a productive asset.

And the Super El Niño acts as an accelerant: if 2026-2027 is the year climate impacts become unavoidable for markets and public opinion, will investment in environmental resilience be easier to justify?

We might think the retirement of RCP8.5 weakens this argument, but I believe it sharpens it instead. The current-policy scenario (2.6 °C) remains profoundly dangerous.

And at the level of strategic design — what we do for a living — all of this consolidates that financial language which makes legible proposals that used to speak only in the register of social impact. How do we position a regenerative project in that economic-financial space without renouncing its ethical essence?

The articulation of collective spaces

The local scale could be recovering legitimacy as a space where one can act, adopting new institutional, legal and technical forms. From energy communities in Spain (262 projects, 108 million, 111,000 people), through Scotland’s Community Wealth Building Act, to the Mar Menor trial (which is, after all, a “bio-region”).

The pattern we identify is the construction of governance and ownership structures that retain value — economic, social, ecological — in the territory where it’s generated. In short, what Regenerative Design calls “designing from place.”

In the digital realm, though, community life doesn’t seem to get off the ground easily… the articulation of the collective online still lives on “rented land” — big platforms with investors expecting returns. The fact that “enshittification” is settling into Substack, as it already did on other platforms (Instagram, Twitter-X…), reminds us that community sovereignty still hasn’t been resolved in the digital realm. If anything, the degradation of platforms makes it more urgent to ask: who owns the infrastructure on which we build community? How could we guarantee that the people and communities articulating themselves on a digital platform keep their sovereignty?

Paying attention is what lets the changes we want germinate

We carry on, deeper into the reading of the landscape.

If 80% of the workforce is disengaged, if average attention on screen falls below a minute, if AI adds cognitive load instead of relieving it… then the soil in which any change should germinate is exhausted. Maybe we need to lie fallow for a while.

More than an individual wellbeing problem, this is a question of collective capacity. Ecosocial transitions ask for precisely what runs scarcest — sustained attention, emotional commitment to long-haul projects, tolerance for ambiguity. And it doesn’t look like we have much “social energy” for it.

Maybe we have to start treating attention, trust, social energy as assets that are designed and protected. Not simply a resource assumed to be available. Maybe the regenerative work of our time has to put its attention right there.

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Voice of the month

Terry Irwin and the Transition Design Institute (Carnegie Mellon) are, for me, the voice of this month (and that’s because each month I have to rotate, and I can’t feature them every time).

Irwin is probably the figure who has most clearly placed design at the service of systemic transitions. I’m putting her in focus now because of the 5th International Transition Design Conference — co-organised with Tec de Monterrey and the Universidad de Palermo. The conference takes place in Mexico City from 8 to 11 July, under the theme Weaving Regenerative Futures. It’s the largest global gathering of those of us who work on systemic change, hybrid and in English and Spanish, and the academic embodiment of much of what this issue is about: the local, regenerative futures, design for transition.

And by the way, we’ll be there with our selected proposal, “Designing for Sustained Participation in Regenerative Transitions: Lessons from Five Cases.”

Resource of the month

If you take only one document away from this SENSOR, make it the State of Finance for Nature 2026: Nature in the Red, by the UNEP (with the Economics of Land Degradation Initiative and Vivid Economics). It’s the most complete data reference there is on the gap between destructive and regenerative investment, and it comes with a tool you’ll find very interesting: the Nature Transition X-Curve, designed to guide, at once, the dismantling of harmful flows and the scaling of investment in nature-based solutions. I recommend it because it translates the language of environmental impact into that of financial risk and market opportunity — exactly the bridge you need when a regenerative value proposition has to hold its ground in front of whoever decides budgets. Free download at unep.org/resources/state-finance-nature-2026.

If what’s scarcest when it comes to sustaining a transition is our own attention and our commitment, both of which keep draining away… what would we have to redesign, in our organisations or in our own lives, so that something new had somewhere to take root?

The rest of the panel, at a glance

Even though this month we pulled the thread with a few concrete signals, that doesn’t mean the others can’t be relevant too. Very briefly, the rundown:

On the political-legal front, Europe does two things at once: on one hand it loosens corporate reporting (the Omnibus package delays and trims the CSRD and strips transition plans out of the CSDDD); on the other, it tightens the language that reaches the consumer (the ECGT Directive bans saying “eco,” “natural” or “sustainable” without proof). In the background, the EU opens the consultation on its post-2030 climate framework — an eighteen-month window of influence for anyone working in territorial governance. But if we move down to smaller territorial scales, we see some more radical actions blossom. Scotland turns community wealth building into mandatory law, and the Mar Menor sits in a trial facing those who harmed it.

On the economic front, circularity keeps changing its language: from environmental responsibility to strategic autonomy against geopolitical volatility. ESG enters a legitimacy crisis, caught between the U.S. political backlash and its own lack of accountability. The UNEP puts a number on the wound: 30 destructive dollars for every dollar that protects nature. And Calbee, Japan’s biggest snack maker, switches 14 products to black-and-white packaging because the war in Iran has sent ink prices soaring. A geopolitical crack thousands of kilometres away, landing on the supermarket shelf.

On the socio-cultural front, digital minimalism goes mainstream (86% of Gen Z is trying to cut screen time). Spain’s energy communities pass 111,000 people, while the social and solidarity economy gains institutional recognition. Elsewhere, “enshittification” reaches Substack and breeds discouragement toward the collective blogger culture. Add to that the Great Detachment at work, “Generation Numb,” and the collapse of attention. And to top it off, the papal encyclical on AI: the Vatican’s new crusade.

On the technological front, agentic AI deploys faster than we know how to govern it (only 21% of firms have mature frameworks), while its electricity use doubles forecasts, and companies like Uber and Microsoft start admitting that AI’s ROI doesn’t add up on their balance sheets. Meanwhile, the digital product passport advances as traceability infrastructure.

And on the environmental front, the signals pile up like clouds before the storm: rivers are losing oxygen and the landscape’s ecological connectivity is projected to be at risk. Meanwhile, biodiversity makes its debut as an asset class in investment funds. This year’s Super El Niño projections sit in contrast with the retirement of the worst climate scenario, RCP8.5, by one sector of the scientific community.

And you — what other signals have you spotted out there? And… how are you adapting to the change?

Let us know ;)

Pedro Sáez Martínez

A new world is continuously taking shape, setting inspiring horizons before us alongside complex challenges. In that in-between space, between what is and what could be, Creative Regeneration is a community of practice and research that seeks to give life to what’s coming.

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This piece is part of Creative Regeneration — a community and a strategic design methodology focused on designing the conditions that make ecosocial transitions possible. Always published under Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0).

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References

• Allwork.Space / Sponge. 2026. “Leading Generation Numb: How Managers Can Reignite a Disengaged Workforce.” March.
• Cleary Gottlieb. 2026. “Climate and Energy: EU Policy and Regulation Update.” 6 May.
• ECMWF / Severe Weather Europe / TIME. 2026. Super El Niño 2026 coverage. April-May.
• elDiario.es. 2026. “Juicio histórico para el Mar Menor.” 13 May.
• Fortune; The Verge / TechRadar; The Next Web. 2026. On Uber’s and Microsoft’s AI spend. May.
• Future Economy Scotland; gov.scot. 2026. On the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026. April-June. (Legal text: legislation.gov.uk/asp/2026/7).
• Gallup. 2026. State of the Global Workplace 2026. April.
• Geels, Frank W. 2002. “Technological transitions as evolutionary reconfiguration processes.” Research Policy 31 (8-9).
• Mark, Gloria. 2023. Attention Span. HarperCollins. (Longitudinal data 2004-2022; empirical data runs to 2020. The 2026 extrapolations in the Eliav, N. preprint, “The Cognitive Divergence”, arXiv:2603.26707, March 2026, are not peer-reviewed and should be read as indicative orders of magnitude.)
• McCann FitzGerald. 2026. “EU (Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition) Regulations 2026.” April.
• Vatican News; TIME; National Catholic Reporter. 2026. On the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (Leo XIV). May. (Full text at vatican.va.)
• Triodos Investment Management. 2026. “Agriculture and forestry offer investors a concrete path to positive biodiversity impact.” March.
• UNEP. 2026. State of Finance for Nature 2026: Nature in the Red. 22 January.
• van Vuuren, D. P. et al. 2026. “ScenarioMIP-CMIP7.” Geoscientific Model Development 19: 2627-2656.
• Viernes en Kiribati (Ramón Téstor). 2026. “La mierdificación llega a Substack.” 9 April.
• World Economic Forum. 2026. “Why the circular economy is experiencing a renewal moment.” 12 March.