Our built environment now weighs more than all the living things, including humans, on the globe.
A new Banksy mural adorns a destroyed building in Ukraine
Anonymous graffiti artist Banksy, who is known for sending political messages, has revealed a new mural on a building destroyed by shelling in Ukraine.
Resilience for compounding & cascading events
There was a time not long ago when disasters would strike one at
a time, and communities would have time to recover and rebuild.
Today, however, there is a new normal regarding disasters, one in
which most do not occur as isolated events and instead seem to pile
on one another, often unleashing new devastation on a community
before it has had a chance to recover from the prior disaster.
Wealth as territory of transition
In the US alone, about $35 trillion to $70 trillion in wealth will transfer from one generation to another in the next twenty years. Most of this wealth will move between family members in the wealthiest 0.1%. Pundits, economists, financial advisors and others are calling this the “largest generation wealth transfer in history.”
Limits and Beyond
Edited by Ugo Bardi & Carlos Alvarez Pereira
In 1972, a book changed the world.
The Club of Rome commissioned a report that shifted how we see what humans are doing to the planet. Looking back five decades later, what happened next, what did we do and not do, what did we learn, and what happens now?
It’s official: ‘Permacrisis’ is 2022’s word of the year
We’ve all been living in a state of permanent crisis, a “permacrisis” if you will, according to lexicographers at the U.K.-based Collins Dictionary who have anointed it the word of the year for 2022.
Ecosocial collapse & the Lithium Triangle in Argentina, Bolivia & Chile
Dr. Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale joined Tom Kruse from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to discuss what the predominant narrative around the polycrisis–framed by North American and European-based institutions–is missing when it fails to incorporate perspectives from the Global South.
Majority of world’s food producers risk being cooked by climate change
Worsening global heatwaves pose a threat to 70 percent of the world’s agricultural and food production between now and 2045, a recent study by risk analysts Verisk Maplecroft has found.
The past, present, and urgent future of rationing
Managing increasing demand for water, clean air, minerals, energy, and food is rapidly becoming one of our greatest challenges. What strategies are available to us? Are there alternatives to winners and losers? Stan Cox’s work on looks at these pressing topics through the lens of rationing in his recent piece published by the FAN Initiative.
Rationing in the Polycrisis with Stan Cox
Managing increasing demand for water, clean air, minerals, energy, and food is rapidly becoming one of our greatest challenges. What strategies are available to us? Are there alternatives to winners and losers?
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...
Jul
11
2025
The business of betting on catastrophe
by Susan Erikson in MIT Press… World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn...
Jul
10
2025
Global drought hotspots report catalogs severe suffering, economic damage
by United Nations press release…Food, water, energy crises, human tragedies in 2023-2025 detailed in sweeping analysis by U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center...
Jul
09
2025
Droughts worldwide pushing tens of millions towards starvation, says report
by Fiona Harvey in The Guardian…Water shortages hitting crops, energy and health as crisis gathers pace amid climate breakdown
Jul
08
2025
Thinking long-term about infrastructure
by School of International Futures…75 years is a long enough period of time for the world to change in ways that are unanticipated. For this reason, scenarios...
Jul
07
2025
They asked an A.I. chatbot questions. The answers sent them spiraling.
by Kashmir Hill in The New York Times…Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some...
Jul
03
2025
On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone
by Sam Wolfson in The Guardian…‘This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we’re living through is a series of crises … It’s not going to be a sudden...
Jul
02
2025
The business of betting on catastrophe
by Susan Erikson in MIT Press…World Bank pandemic bonds paid out only after death tolls passed a threshold. They’re part of a booming market where investors turn...
Jul
01
2025
Can we see our future in China’s cameras?
by Megan K. Stack in The New York Times…It’s not that our government is using the surveillance infrastructure in the same manner as China. It’s that, as far as...
Jun
16
2025
Global wheat yields would be ‘10%’ higher without climate change
by Orla Dwyer in Carbon Brief…Climate science has “done a remarkable job of anticipating global impacts on the main grains and we should continue to rely on this...
Jun
12
2025
Q&A with Jason Pruet
by Kyle Dickman in Los Alamos National Laboratory…For a variety of reasons, government support for big science has been eroding since then. Now, AI is starting to...