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.
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.
Rediscovering harmony: How Chinese philosophy offers pathways to a regenerative future
By foregrounding relationships — between individuals, communities, and the natural world — we can build systems that prioritize wellbeing and resilience.
Wanted: An early-warning system for the end of the world
by Charlie Cooper in Politico…Some experts believe we could hit catastrophic climate ‘tipping points’ in a matter of years. The U.K. government, with a bit of help from Dominic Cummings, is trying to prepare.
Policy brief: Nature for resilience
From UNDRR….Healthy and resilient ecosystems are key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the objectives of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (Sendai Framework) and the Paris Agreement. However, there are noticeable gaps in terms of specific data, pathways and evidence regarding the ways in which changes in ecosystem functions and services contribute to vulnerability or resilience building.
More in this category
Going sane in a crazy world
By Richard Heinberg, in Resilience.org….The consequences of our adoption of consumerist, growth-seeking industrialism will ultimately be a crash—hopefully only partial and temporary—of society and nature.
The case for hope
by NICHOLAS KRISTOF in The New York Times…The truth is that if you had to pick a time to be alive in the past few hundred thousand years of human history, it would probably be now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Lean Weaving”: Creating networks for a future of resilience and regeneration
by Curtis Ogden in the International Institute for Social Change….“The more flexible the sub-systems, the longer the expected life of the system as a whole.”
Crazy Town: Episode 74. Prepping for the apocalypse: Elites’ foolish fantasies for surviving a collapse of their own creation
by Asher Miller, et al., in podcast Crazy Town: Meet Barrett Moore, the bunker-building bullshit artist who helps capitalists survive the apocalypse with beans, bullets, and bravado. Please share this episode with your friends and start a conversation.
The Seven Shifts
in Horizon 2045…We safeguard the wellbeing—and the promise—
of future generations.
We realign our human experience around propelling humanity forward
Friction is growing
by Bill McKibben in Resilience.org…The past decade of global natural catastrophes has been the costliest ever. Warmer temperatures have made storms worse and contributed to droughts that have elevated wildfire risk. Too many new homes were built in areas at risk of fire.
Mark Zuckerberg spent $187 million secretly buying 1,600 acres of Hawaii land, and now he is reportedly building a massive self-sustaining apocalypse bunker
by Caleb Naysmith in Yahoo Finance…Alongside the sprawling farm and ranch, the compound is being designed to be self-sustaining. From underground bunkers to its own energy and water supplies, the compound has nearly everything you would need to survive for months at a time.
How to thrive in an uncertain world
by Maggie Jackson in The New York Times…Humans naturally need answers and so typically find uncertainty aversive. With a presidential election, war erupting in multiple zones, rising climate volatility and myriad other types of flux, it’s easy to feel overwhelming angst for the future and see certainty as a beacon in a darkening time.
Global Risks Report 2024
from the World Economic Forum….As we enter 2024, 2023-2024 GRPS results highlight a predominantly negative outlook for the world over the next two years that is expected to worsen over the next decade