Ecological ‘doom loops’ edging closer

from University of Sheffield….Extreme weather events such as wildfires and droughts will accelerate change in stressed systems leading to quicker tipping points of ecological decline, according to a new study.

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.

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...
Mar 26 2024

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...
Mar 26 2024

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...
Mar 26 2024

Dancing with a permanent emergency

by Jonathan Rowson in The Joyous Struggle….The climate crisis is still there, and it is a moral imperative to address it and it matters perhaps more than any...
Mar 26 2024

The European Union’s economic security strategy update

By Emily Benson in CSIS….As partners advance to this new era of technology-driven economic security agendas, governments will need to work concertedly to break...
Mar 21 2024

Led by Its Youth, U.S. Sinks in World Happiness Report

For the first time since the first World Happiness Report was issued in 2012, the United States was not ranked among the world’s Top 20 happiest countries. The drop was...
Mar 19 2024

The Eco-Civilization Framework

As the planet burns, authoritarian populists dominate politics, oil executives direct the COP process, and the wealthy elite pull further away from everyone else, it is...
Mar 18 2024

A starting point for degrowth: The Costa Rica “Pura Vida” meaning

By Juan Ignacio Marín Degrowth is a theory, a movement, and a practice with a long and distinguished history. The excellent Wikipedia article (worth consulting) starts...
Mar 18 2024

“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...
Mar 18 2024

Chartbook 268: “How can we not know?”: CAR and the challenge of tracking a silent crisis.

By Adam Tooze in Chartbook 268…It was at a moment when many of us were discussing the polycrisis as a concept with which to grasp the current world. Was an...
Mar 18 2024

History’s crisis detectives: How we’re using maths and data to reveal why societies collapse – and clues about the future

by Daniel Hoyer in The Conversation….Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people...