The great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

by Tess McClure in The Guardian…As populations move and shrink, people are leaving long-occupied places behind. Often they leave everything in place, ready for a return that never comes. In Tyurkmen, Christmas baubles still hang from the curtain rails in empty houses, slowly being wrapped by spiders. In one abandoned home, a porcelain cabinet lay inside a crater of rotted floorboards, plates still stacked above a spare packet of nappies for a visiting grandchild. Occasionally, abandonment happens all at once, when a legal ruling or evacuation sends people scuttling. But mostly, it is haphazard, creeping, unplanned. People just go.

Global emergence of regional heatwave hotspots outpaces climate model simulations

by Kai Kornhuber, et al. in PNAS…Multiple recent record-shattering weather events raise questions about the adequacy of climate models to effectively predict and prepare for unprecedented climate impacts on human life, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Here, we show that extreme heat in several regions globally is increasing significantly and faster in magnitude than what state-of-the-art climate models have predicted under present warming even after accounting for their regional summer background warming.

Multisolving

Multisolving

Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World For most of Elizabeth Sawin’s career, she was not a multisolver. Instead, she worked on a single, albeit immensely important problem: climate change. Despite tremendous effort—long hours of teaching, attending conferences,...

The R word

by Alex Evans in The Good Apocalypse Guide…My idea of apocalypse resilience used to be pretty similar. Survival = self preservation (emphasis on self there) = stockpiling + steel doors x semiautomatic weapons.

Trees as infrastructure

from Dark Matter Laboratories…An open source model to support municipalities in transitioning toward resilient urban forest management practices

More in this tag

Jul 06 2023

Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement

by Dr. Michael Lawrence at The Cascade Institute….. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with...
Feb 07 2025

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...
Feb 06 2025

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...
Feb 05 2025

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...
Feb 04 2025

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.

Feb 03 2025

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...
Jan 31 2025

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...
Jan 31 2025

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.

Jan 30 2025

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...
Jan 28 2025

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...
Jan 28 2025

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...