Insurable losses from natural disasters – how have the numbers changed over the years?
by Terry Gangcuanco in Insurance Business Magazine….Canadian insurtech MyChoice has released a new study showing a sharp rise in insurable losses linked to natural disasters over the past four decades.
Holding states to account: do humanitarians undermine civil society?
by Zainab Moallin in ODI.org…Are humanitarian efforts, despite their best intentions, diminishing civil society’s capacity to advocate for systemic change with the state? How do interactions with the state shape the roles of CSOs seeking to represent vulnerable and marginalised segments of society? And how are CSOs being employed as part of the dominant international aid architecture to maintain ‘business as usual’ and limit state-led crisis response?
AI Snake Oil—A New Book by 2 Princeton University Computer Scientists
by Eric Topol in Ground Truths….A Counter to the Hype and Some Misleading Claims
The Earth Does Not Speak in Prose, A conversation with Paul Kingsnorth
Interviewed by Charlotte Du Cann, Paul Kingsnorth, writer and Dark Mountain co-founder….writes about forging a language that can speak with and for the more-than-human world.
GAR Special Report 2024: Forensic insights for future resilience learning from past disasters
from the GAR Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction…If we accept that disasters are neither natural nor inevitable, then we must work to prevent or at least reduce their impact.
Our polycrisis demands a radically new approach to risk management
By Ruth Richardson in Open Access Government…A fundamental part of the problem is that our current tools and strategies aren’t designed to assess the types of systemic risks that we face: risks that manifest as extreme global shocks, interconnect with one another, and turn into long-term crises. More often than not, risk assessment is siloed or focused only narrowly on certain issues or “known” problems.
The Regeneration Handbook: System-changing strategies
by Don Hall in Resilience.org…Many Transition Initiatives, from Fujino, Japan, to London, England, have started their own community-owned renewable energy companies. These entities typically raise funds by offering shares to local investors, some of whom pitch in as little as a few hundred dollars, then use those funds to purchase, install, and maintain solar photovoltaic arrays and wind turbines. The community as a whole benefits from increased renewable energy production, and small local investors, instead of utility company executives and shareholders, reap the financial benefits.
The security blind spot: Cascading climate impacts and tipping points threaten national security
by Laurie Laybourn, et al. in IPPR…Recent governments have not considered climate change a priority national security issue. But climate-security threats are non-linear and are escalating, posing profound challenges to national and international security.
Applying resilience thinking
from Stockholm Resilience Centre….Simply enhancing the resilience of the existing ecosystem services can entrench and exacerbate inequalities. Important trade-offs exist between different ecosystem services (e.g. crop production and biodiversity), and it is not possible to enhance the resilience of all ecosystem services simultaneously.
Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.
by John Morales in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists…And then came the rain.
Preliminary storm-total rainfall measured on the ground included nearly 31 inches (782 millimeters) in Yancey County, northeast of Asheville, North Carolina. Radar estimated totals in areas where there were no rain gauges exceeded 40 inches (1,000 mm) just over the state line in South Carolina’s Greenville County.
Chartbook 325: Wrestling with transition thinking. Or on being “interregnumed” and how to resist it. (Hegemony notes 8)
by Adam Tooze in Chartbook 325…The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence
Sean Illing of The Gray Area interviews Yuval Noah Harari…If the internet age has anything like an ideology, it’s that more information and more data and more openness will create a better world. The reality is more complicated. It has never been easier to know more about The world than it is right now, and it has never been easier to share that knowledge than it is right now. But I don’t think you can look at the state of things and conclude that this has been a victory for truth and wisdom. What are we to make of that? More information might not be the solution, but neither is more ignorance.
How rising global heat connects catastrophic floods on four continents
by Scott Dance in The Washington Post…At this time of year, that flood potential amped up by global warming can become especially evident.
Scaling: The state of play in AI
by Ethan Mollick in One Useful Thing…With continued advancements in model architecture and training techniques, we’re approaching a new frontier in AI capabilities. The independent AI agents that tech companies have long promised are likely just around the corner. These systems will be able to handle complex tasks with minimal human oversight, with wide-ranging implications. As the pace of AI development seems more certain to accelerate, we need to prepare for both the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Facing global risks with honest hope
From (ASRA) Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment report Facing global risks with honest hope….Transforming Multidimensional
Challenges into Multidimensional
Possibilities
Superbugs ‘could kill 39m people by 2050’ amid rising drug resistance
by Kat Lay in The Guardian…Child deaths from infections see ‘remarkable’ decline but AMR fatalities of over-70s likely to rise by 146%, study finds
Analysis: Drug-resistant infections are on the rise – so why aren’t we getting any new antibiotics?