‘Inside an oven’: sweltering heat ravages crops and takes lives in south-east Asia
by Rebecca Ratcliffe in The Guardian….Governments issue health warnings as schools shut and crops fail, with fears that worse is to come as heatwave tightens grip
Biden and the spectre of polycrisis
by Edward Luce in Financial Times….So many crises assail the world that their spilling into each other and merging is a genuine risk
Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness
by Fran H Norris, et al. in Am J or Community Psych…..To build collective resilience, communities must reduce risk and resource inequities, engage local people in mitigation, create organizational linkages, boost and protect social supports, and plan for not having a plan, which requires flexibility, decision-making skills, and trusted sources of information that function in the face of unknowns.
The flooding will come “No Matter What”
by Abrahm Lustgarten in Propublica…The complex, contradictory and heartbreaking process of American climate migration is underway.
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
by Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine…The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties, +972 and Local Call reveal.
A national security insider does the math on the dangers of AI
by Lauren Goode in Wired…..Jason Matheny, CEO of the influential think tank Rand Corporation, says advances in AI are making it easier to learn how to build biological weapons and other tools of destruction.
This Japanese shop is 1,020 years old. It knows a bit about surviving crises
by Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno in The New York Times….A mochi seller in Kyoto, and many of Japan’s other centuries-old businesses, have endured by putting tradition and stability over profit and growth.
What makes a society more resilient? Frequent hardship.
by Carl Zimmer in The New York Times…..Comparing 30,000 years of human history, researchers found that surviving famine, war or climate change helps groups recover more quickly from future shocks.
These century-old stone “Tsunami Stones” dot Japan’s coastline
by Danny Lewis in Smithsonian Magazine….“Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
New world order?
by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Phenomenal World….At The Polycrisis we have been tracking the whipsaw of the global financial system amid private finance mantras, interest-rate hikes at the Fed, and the explosion of debt in the global South.
Climate crisis → drought → food deficit → migration
by Mohan Mainali in Nepali Times….Half-century of eastern Nepal’s rainfall data points to a link between chronic drought and depopulation
Resilience revisited 02. Dissonance as conscience: navigating the path between ecological integrity and everyday life
by Tamzin Ractcliffe on Linked In…As we navigate the complexities of living sustainably in an often unsustainable world, embracing our dissonance—not as a source of guilt but as a catalyst for change—can empower us. It’s a call to action that reminds us of the urgency of our collective efforts toward ecological integrity.
Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms and confounds climate scientists
by Johathan Watts in The Guardian…If the anomaly does not stabilise by August, ‘the world will be in uncharted territory’, says climate expert
The futures triangle
from Insight & Foresight….The Futures Triangle is a tool that can help you map the gap between vision and performance and start the process of using foresight to support your planning and decisions making for impact and future growth.
The eco-civilization framework
by Jeremy Lent in Resilience.org…Whether we can reweave the strands of our unraveling civilization into a flourishing future will only be known on the other side of the turmoil that lies ahead this century. But as each climate disaster brings our current system closer to collapse, we have an overriding obligation to future generations, and to life itself, to shine a directional beacon through the darkness of our times to a potentially brighter future—and to help lay down a trail toward it.
Dancing with a permanent emergency
by Jonathan Rowson in The Joyous Struggle….The climate crisis is still there, and it is a moral imperative to address it and it matters perhaps more than any other single issue matters. And yet, because we are so profoundly stuck, I think our best chance, perhaps our only chance, is to see the climate challenge through the prism of the metacrisis, with all that follows for educational and spiritual innovation, which is why that has become my professional focus. Once we realise that there is no way to act on climate change with the requisite skill, insight, legitimacy, and resolve without contending with the metacrisis, our sense of priority should change. There is, as they say, no way round but through.