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

Why the world needs its own immune system

by Atul Gawande in The New York Times…A global immune system must be built for speed. Speed in detecting that a pattern of illness might be unusual and dangerous. Speed in diagnosis. Speed in alerting public health officials and tracing the path of exposure. Speed in getting treatment to the sick and preventive measures to the well.

An ancient Chinese text that’s surprisingly relevant today

by Richard Heinberg in Resilience.org….I’ll leave the last words to the Old Master, this time from the Bahm translation:
Whenever someone sets out to remold the world, experience teaches that he is bound to fail.
For Nature is already as good as it can be.
It cannot be improved upon.
He who tries to redesign it, spoils it.
He who tries to redirect it, misleads it.

Visualizing the top global risks in 2024

from the World Economic Forum….From a broader perspective, key structural forces are influencing global risks looking ahead. They include technological acceleration, climate change, shifts in geopolitical power, and a widening demographic divide.

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 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...
Jun 11 2025

The impunity of the unscathed: Risk, elite security, and the rage of MAGA populism

by Nils Gilman in Small Precautions…MAGA, in its rawest form, embodies the fury of those who feel that the burden of these risks has been disproportionately...