Applying resilience thinking

from Stockholm Resilience Centre….Simply enhancing the resilience of the existing ecosystem services can entrench and exacerbate inequalities. Important trade-offs exist between different ecosystem services (e.g. crop production and biodiversity), and it is not possible to enhance the resilience of all ecosystem services simultaneously.

Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.

by John Morales in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists…And then came the rain.

Preliminary storm-total rainfall measured on the ground included nearly 31 inches (782 millimeters) in Yancey County, northeast of Asheville, North Carolina. Radar estimated totals in areas where there were no rain gauges exceeded 40 inches (1,000 mm) just over the state line in South Carolina’s Greenville County.

Yuval Noah Harari on the eclipsing of human intelligence

Sean Illing of The Gray Area interviews Yuval Noah Harari…If the internet age has anything like an ideology, it’s that more information and more data and more openness will create a better world. The reality is more complicated. It has never been easier to know more about The world than it is right now, and it has never been easier to share that knowledge than it is right now. But I don’t think you can look at the state of things and conclude that this has been a victory for truth and wisdom. What are we to make of that? More information might not be the solution, but neither is more ignorance.

Scaling: The state of play in AI

by Ethan Mollick in One Useful Thing…With continued advancements in model architecture and training techniques, we’re approaching a new frontier in AI capabilities. The independent AI agents that tech companies have long promised are likely just around the corner. These systems will be able to handle complex tasks with minimal human oversight, with wide-ranging implications. As the pace of AI development seems more certain to accelerate, we need to prepare for both the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Facing global risks with honest hope

From (ASRA) Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment report Facing global risks with honest hope….Transforming Multidimensional
Challenges into Multidimensional
Possibilities

Global trends are polarizing us: Can democracy handle it?

by Richard Heinberg in resilience.org….Today the world faces historically unique stresses that are likely to be increasingly polarizing for many societies. These stresses can be divided into three groups—environmental, economic, and technological. After examining these, we’ll explore two questions: first, is democracy inherently more polarizing than autocratic forms of government? And second, are democracies or autocracies better at handling crises?

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...
Nov 01 2024

The Regeneration Handbook: System-changing strategies

by Don Hall in Resilience.org…Many Transition Initiatives, from Fujino, Japan, to London, England, have started their own community-owned renewable energy...
Oct 31 2024

Insurable losses from natural disasters – how have the numbers changed over the years?

by Terry Gangcuanco in Insurance Business Magazine….Canadian insurtech MyChoice has released a new study showing a sharp rise in insurable losses linked to...
Oct 30 2024

Holding states to account: do humanitarians undermine civil society?

by Zainab Moallin in ODI.org…Are humanitarian efforts, despite their best intentions, diminishing civil society’s capacity to advocate for systemic change with...
Oct 29 2024

AI Snake Oil—A New Book by 2 Princeton University Computer Scientists

by Eric Topol in Ground Truths….A Counter to the Hype and Some Misleading Claims

Oct 28 2024

The Earth Does Not Speak in Prose, A conversation with Paul Kingsnorth

Interviewed by Charlotte Du Cann, Paul Kingsnorth, writer and Dark Mountain co-founder….writes about forging a language that can speak with and for the...
Oct 22 2024

GAR Special Report 2024: Forensic insights for future resilience learning from past disasters

from the GAR Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction…If we accept that disasters are neither natural nor inevitable, then we must work to prevent or...
Oct 22 2024

Our polycrisis demands a radically new approach to risk management

By Ruth Richardson in Open Access Government…A fundamental part of the problem is that our current tools and strategies aren’t designed to assess the types of...
Oct 22 2024

The Regeneration Handbook: System-changing strategies

by Don Hall in Resilience.org…Many Transition Initiatives, from Fujino, Japan, to London, England, have started their own community-owned renewable energy...
Oct 22 2024

The security blind spot: Cascading climate impacts and tipping points threaten national security

by Laurie Laybourn, et al. in IPPR…Recent governments have not considered climate change a priority national security issue. But climate-security threats are...
Oct 10 2024

The collapse is coming. Will humanity adapt?

by Peter Watts in The MIT Press…..Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear...