[Need a introductory paragraph here that is less climate-focussed].
Civilisation has evolved in an exceptionally stable climatic period and our modern human systems, with ‘just-in-time’ supply chains and just-sufficient infrastructure, are predicated on it continuing. At barely more than 1℃ of global warming, however, the Earth systems on which our human systems depend started to become severely disrupted and, even if national climate pledges are honoured, we are on track for nearly 3℃ by 2100. Non-linearities in Earth systems mean that 3℃ is significantly more than three times as bad as 1℃, and 3℃ of average global warming means 6℃ on some land masses and 8℃ in some cities.
Recognising the looming disasters, disruption and dislocations of a warming world, government and intergovernmental bodies are starting to take societal resilience seriously. As examples, the UN’s Race to Resilience initiative aims to “build adaptive capacities and strengthen the resilience of vulnerable urban, rural and coastal communities with the goal of protecting four billion people by 2030”, while in the UK a new government ‘resilience framework’ is marshalling a ”whole of society” approach to acute crises.
It is becoming widely accepted that the degradation of human systems by increasingly unstable Earth systems represents a feedback loop wherein climate impacts make it harder to act collectively on climate and other elements of the polycrisis - a mechanism sometimes termed ‘climate derailment’. In this context, resilience becomes more than just limiting detrimental impacts on lives and livelihoods for their own sake but becomes about holding the fabric of society together sufficiently to navigate through this civilisational bottleneck. Indeed societal resilience might make the difference between collapsing into dystopia and enabling a kind of collective post-traumatic growth that could transform our systems to operate more inline with reality.
The work of fostering resilient societies is not a replacement or alternative to climate mitigation, it is interwoven with them. Every tonne of CO², every fraction of a degree of warming, still matters. In fact the more the world warms, the more impact every fraction of a degree will have. Without any mitigation, it will not matter how resilient we are, conditions will just become too inhospitable for complex societies. And mitigation over the long-haul, in the context of climate derailment, will certainly require resilience. Many experts have also suggested that balancing mitigation with adaptation and resilience is not a zero-sum game; Working with communities on adaptation and resilience helps citizens to visualise local impacts and take tangible action, which in turn overcomes key psychological barriers and increases support for climate change mitigation at a global level.
Investing in critical physical infrastructure and material processes ahead of societal shocks improve the outcomes for communities in the aftermath. Researchers also suggest that human-centred policies and practices conducted before, during and after disaster periods can improve individual and collective outcomes to a large extent, and that it should be possible to design “societal interventions that promote resilience in a large population of individuals physically and emotionally” (Mao et al., 2021).
<aside> 💡 Below are some key resources framing the global challenges that necessitate increased investment in societal resilience, and you can find a list of non-fiction books here.
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Global Risks Report 2024 | World Economic Forum
2022 Special Report on Human Security | Human Development Reports
Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services | IPBES secretariat
‘We need dramatic social and technological changes’: is societal collapse inevitable?