From risk to resilience: Wildfires and the insurance industry’s climate reckoning
Doug Parsons interviews Dr. Carolyn Kousky in America Adapts the Climate Change Podcast…Carolyn shares insights on how the industry can respond to these challenges by closing protection gaps, incentivizing resilience, and creating innovative solutions to build more climate-resilient communities. It’s a timely and critical conversation at the intersection of insurance, wildfires, and the future of climate adaptation.
China’s ageing population: A demographic crisis is unfolding for Xi
by Laura Bicker in BBC…Over the next decade, about 300 million people, who are currently aged 50 to 60, are set to leave the Chinese workforce. This is the country’s largest age group, nearly equivalent to the size of the US population.
Anthropocene under dark skies: The compounding effects of nuclear winter and overstepped planetary boundaries
by Florian Jehn in EGU…The analysis of global catastrophic events often occurs in isolation, simplifying their study. In reality, risks cascade and interact.
Climate models can’t explain what’s happening to Earth
by Zoë Schlanger in The Atlantic…Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on.
Strategy 2030 mid-term review and forecast
by Solferino Academy…“We are too often still operating from fixed mindsets and with fixed responses rather than recognising the interconnected nature of issues we are facing”
Reasons for hope in 2025
by Suzette Brooks Masters in Fulcrum…My way of not giving in to despair and apathy amid all this uncertainty is to look for sources of hope, to find in uncertainty itself reasons for hope. Happily, once you look for the places where hope and imagination live, you find it in ample supply. As part of the research I conducted for Democracy Funders Network’s Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy report, I talked to dozens of visionaries who were imagining and creating new and better ways of being with one another, with nature, with technology, and with the planet. The final section of that paper, titled Inspiration, is my curated compilation of examples of what better futures could look like in real life and in the imagination. Whenever I feel the pull of pessimism, I turn back to those examples.
The incredible, world-altering ‘Black Swan’ events that could upend life in 2025
From Politico Magazine…15 futurists, foreign policy analysts and other prognosticators provide some explosive potential scenarios for the new year.
A food apocalypse is coming; There is no plan to feed Britain in a crisis
by James Rebanks in UnHerd…The answer is to be ready, with a more resilient and secure food system before something goes wrong. We need an inspired farming system that’s largely confined to our own island, and which we can rely upon in a crisis. There is no food security unless we can feed people locally in an emergency.
Certainty is boring
by Jeanette Bronee in her blog…We may never know exactly what to do to meet the future and its constantly changing reality, but aligning with what matters becomes our North Star. To avoid getting stuck on the hamster wheel of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), we must learn to pause more. These moments of pause allow us to reconnect with our intention and align with our strategy, giving us the courage to move forward with clarity and confidence. After all, change and growth are essential to life—that’s why certainty is boring.
The next financial crisis: Insurance
by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect… Increasing damage from fires, hurricanes, and floods will destabilize a lightly regulated industry—and spill over into broader financial markets.
Left organizing is in crisis. Philanthropy is a major reason why.
by Nina Luo in The Nation…Progressive philanthropy lacks good strategy, so too many of our organizations are hollow—and that left us unable to prevent a second Trump term.
Braiding indigenous and western knowledge for climate-adapted forests: An ecocultural state of science report
by Cristina Eisenberg et al…Our ecocultural state-of-knowledge report brings
together Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and Western
Science (WS) to support climate and wildfire adaptation
strategies for forest landscapes. This report builds
on federal directives to respectfully and intentionally
braid IK and WS knowledge systems in a Two-Eyed
Seeing approach that informs climate- and wildfireadaptation strategies to conserve our public forests.
‘Unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth: Scientists call for halt on ‘mirror life’ microbe research
by Ian Sample in The Guardian…Experts warn that mirror bacteria, constructed from mirror images of molecules found in nature, could put humans, animals and plants at risk of lethal infections
Is the world becoming uninsurable?
by Charles Hugh Smith on Substack…This is not an abstraction, though many are treating it as a policy debate. As noted previously here, the insurance industry is not a charity, and insurers bear the costs that are increasing regardless of opinions and policy proposals. Insurers operate in the real world, and their decisions to pull out of entire regions, reduce coverage and increase premiums are all responses to soaring losses.
Fueling innovation to navigate the wildfire challenge ahead
by Chris Anthony, et al, in Stanford Social Innovation Review..The climate-driven wildfire crisis calls for a comprehensive, cross-sector approach to funding, research, and action.
IPBES report highlights Indigenous & local knowledge as key to ‘transformative change’
by Sonam Lama Hyolmo in Mongabay…The report identifies three underlying causes of the biodiversity crisis: the disconnection from nature, inequitable power and wealth distribution, and the prioritization of short-term gains. Karen O’Brien, co-chair of the assessment and a sociology professor at the University of Oslo, said these issues have led to destructive views and behaviors that exacerbate biodiversity loss, including the risk of irreversible tipping points that threaten ecological systems.