A connection with tomorrow’s citizens – calling for a Ministry for the Future

By David Salt

In a year of climate disasters, you’ve likely forgotten about what happened in India back in March and April. The country experienced its worst heatwave on record in terms of high temperatures, duration and geographical extent. At the end of April around 70% of India was stricken by the ‘event’, killing hundreds of people (probably a gross underestimate), and reducing crop yields by up to 35% in some regions. Heat waves are common in India but the science is suggesting they are now being supercharged by climate change. And things only promise to get worse.

I remember being appalled by the news reports I was reading at the time. Surely, when one of the world’s most populous nations is literally withering under global warming, right in front of our eyes, surely people start to act? Right?

Wrong! Just consider the hyperbolic rhetoric flowing from the just completed COP27 climate conference and its underwhelming outcomes. (What did António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, say? Oh, that’s right: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”)

And, as I suggested, if you’d even heard about the Indian heatwaves, you’ve likely forgotten them following the unprecedented Pakistan floods, Europe’s killer summer, the United States devastating hurricanes or China’s record drought. We’re becoming normalized to climate catastrophes!

In any event, back in May, after hearing me ask ‘can you believe what’s happening in India?’ for the twelfth time, a colleague gave me a copy of the book The Ministry for the Future to read. He said it’s full of interesting ideas about how to deal with the growing climate crisis and it begins in India during a heatwave (‘which you keep rabbiting on about’).

Delirium and fever

I thanked him, noted that (according to its cover) Barack Obama had highly commended it (clearly very ‘worthy’), and that it was over 550 pages long in really tiny type. I got home and put it on the reading pile where I expected it to gather dust because deep down I suspected it was just another technobooster effort to get us to believe that while the challenge was big, science would ride in to save us; something I’m very dubious about (and have discussed in the past). I probably wouldn’t read it at all. (I’m so tired of ‘worthy’ being drowned by ‘hypocrisy’.)

Then I came down with Covid, and for three days I suffered my own personal heatwave (high fever). And it was in this somewhat delirious state that I picked up The Ministry for the Future and began to read.

The opening chapter was truly nightmarish. It described a town in India trapped in an unrelenting heatwave in which almost everyone dies; except for a traumatized aid worker, Frank May, who miraculously survives but is scarred for life.

Frank searches for meaning and ends up getting to know Mary Murphy, the head of the Ministry for the Future, a group established under the Paris Agreement to work on policies that take into account the needs of future generations. How will they save the world?

Wait a sec, I asked myself. Is this real? Is there such a thing as a ‘Ministry for the Future’? And why would Mary, a former foreign minister of Ireland, show any interest in a burnt-out husk like Frank (especially when her job is about saving the world)?

Is this for real?

Well, of course, there is no such thing as the Ministry for the Future. The book was written in 2020 by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (KSR). Indeed, according to its Wiki entry, the book is classified as ‘hard science fiction’; which is to say that the science presented is pretty robust (which, I gotta say, strikes me as valid; the science came over to me as authentic and realistic). And yet it’s like no sci fi I’ve ever read. Indeed, I’d place it in that little known genre, ‘hard policy fiction’.

The plot begins in 2025 with a killer heat wave in India (Kim got that wrong, it actually hit in 2022) and ambles its way into the future up until the 58^th COP meeting of the Paris Agreement and a bit beyond.

Despite my initial reluctance, I found myself enthralled by the dazzling spectrum of ideas being presented and the multitude of methods KSR employed to tell his story. Mary and Frank are central characters, and their perspectives helped ground the story, but at the same time they are peripheral to a complex tale that goes off in all directions.

The story consists of 106 relatively short chapters, but the detail in many of these (economic theory, climate science, history and governance for example) often makes the prose difficult to engage with and absorb. It really is a tour de force, but it’s not an easy or page-turning read.

I think the thing that won me over was that while it deployed science as one way of dealing with some of the impacts of climate change, it did so in a low key, realistic manner. None of the solutions he presented were silver bullets; and, more than many writers, I thought he gave a good accounting of the trade offs and gaming that occurred around every effort. He creates a very uncertain and complex future world, but one I found quite plausible.

So, while he engaged with geoengineering in the form of aerosols being dumped in the stratosphere (the dumping was done by the Indian Government in response to the heatwaves), the impact was minor (as our current science suggests it would be) and didn’t really fix the problem of over-heating. In the world of the near future KSR also dyed the Arctic sea yellow to increase its ability to reflect light (humanity having melted all the highly reflective sea ice) and drained the meltwater under glaciers to slow their disintegration (thereby reducing the speed of sea level rise).

Connecting with the future

But possibly the boldest and most fundamental change being proposed in the book was a combination of economics, technology and innovations in governance that, when combined, gave reason for people to invest in their future.

KSR sets out the idea that if today’s generation were paid to capture carbon but the payments weren’t made until well into the future, then maybe we’d take this task seriously. To this end, KSR suggests the creation of a carbon coin. Each coin represents one ton of carbon sequestered but were only paid out at some time in the future. People, companies, governments would only invest in generating carbon coin if they believed they could cash them in down the line, so they needed to trust the institutions that ran the coin (the world’s banks), and they needed to believe there was a future they could get to.

Block chain is proposed as an important technology here. It is rolled out everywhere, again led by banks and governments, because for this investment in the future to work there needed to be full accountability and transparency (not, say, like what’s happening currently with carbon offsets). Gaming the system wasn’t feasible, and with time the climate denying elites, whose power lay entrenched in the past, began to lose influence.

Simultaneously, grass roots ‘terrorism’ by disenfranchised segments of society were beginning to tear apart the status quo, and many societies were experimenting with different forms of governance that distributed power to the people (and refugees even began to be treated in a humane manner and assigned genuine rights).

Investing in the future

I wonder what it would take to get humanity to really begin investing in the future? It seems unprecedented climate disruption, with the certain prospect of greater disruption with every passing year, is not enough.

There’s way too much in The Ministry for the Future to even briefly summarise its many insights in this blog, but I hope I may have said enough to pique your interest. It took a dose of Covid to get me to read it; I hope it takes less for you to consider it.

I’ll leave you with one memorable quote from the book when an American town suddenly runs out of water:

“Remember what Margaret Thatcher said? There is no such thing as society?

…I can take them all to a place where they will eat those words or die of thirst. Because when the taps run dry, society becomes very real.”

Banner image: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A resilient world is built on humility

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By David Salt

What helps keep a system resilient?

Of course, it depends on context, and everyone brings their own definitions to the party when answering this question. Which means you seldom find two people that will give you the same answer.

Yet, obviously, it’s a pretty important question.

Nine attributes

Towards the end of writing the book Resilience Thinking with Brian Walker, we asked many of the world’s most preeminent resilience scholars (including Buzz Holling) what they thought were the key lessons emerging from resilience science. They responded with a wide variety of answers, both in terms of length of response and areas covered. Even resilience experts vary in what they think is most important about the topic.

We didn’t have room in the book to reprint their responses so instead we attempted to distill their thoughts into a list of nine attributes of a resilient world. In summary, those attributes are:

1. Protect diversity: A resilient world promotes and sustains diversity in all forms (biological, landscape, social and economic).

2. Respect ecological variability: Resilience is about embracing and working with ecological variability, rather than attempting to control and reduce it.

3. Manage with modularity: Resilient systems consist of modular components. Failure in one component doesn’t collapse the system.

4. Acknowledge slow variables: There needs to be a focus on the controlling (often slowly changing) variables associated with thresholds.

5. Govern with appropriate feedbacks: A resilient world possesses tight feedbacks (but not too tight). Are the signals from cost/benefit feedbacks loosening?

6. Cultivate social capital: This is about promoting trust, well developed social networks and effective leadership.

7. Promote innovation: Resilience places an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embracing change.

8. Govern with overlap: A resilient world would have institutions that include ‘redundancy’ in their governance structures, including a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights.

9. Incorporate ecosystem services: A resilient world includes all the unpriced ecosystem services in development proposals and assessments.

It’s a good list (I’d even suggest a great list) though, of course, each attribute requires a lot of unpacking, explaining and illustration with examples (though, it did appear at the end of our book so readers who got this far were already in the frame).

But why only nine?

This was Brian’s idea: ‘Let’s set out nine attributes, one short of the biblical ten, and invite readers to suggest what attribute they would add to our list to complete it.’

I thought it was a dumb idea because a. I didn’t think we’d get much response (this was a science textbook after all), b. I suspected every reader would have their own idea (‘a resilient world would have lots of cats…’) and we’d just get a long list of pet thoughts with no emergent consistency; and c. what’s the point, how would we provide feedback to readers? This was a book afterall, not a monthly magazine.

The tenth (and 11^th) attribute

As it turned out, I was wrong on all counts (hats off to you, Brian).

We received many hundreds of suggestions; most of them thoughtful, well considered and articulate.

And, while there was an enormous variety in the ideas being put forward (and no suggestion that cats would make for a more resilient world), there were clearly four themes constantly coming to the fore: democratization, fairness, learning and humility.

And, while we hadn’t planned on a follow-up book back when Resilience Thinking came out, it became apparent a few years later that people wanted more information on how resilience thinking can be implemented. Consequently, we wrote Resilience Practice, and included a discussion on the feedback we had received from readers of Resilience Thinking at the end.

Indeed, we added fairness and humility to our list of nine. Actually, we felt that the themes of democratization, fairness, learning and humility were all implicit to varying degrees in our original list of nine attributes. Our readers, however, obviously felt that equity and humility needed to be acknowledged explicitly; so we did. Here are the added two attributes to round off our list:

10. Enshrine fairness & equity: A (desirable) resilient world would acknowledge notions of equality among people, encourage democratization so that everyone has a say, a sense of agency, and promote the notion and practice of ‘fair trade’. These attributes would encourage diversity, innovation, collaboration and effective feedbacks while promoting higher levels of social capital.

11. Exercise humility: A resilient world would acknowledge our dependence on the ecosystems that support us, allow us to appreciate the limits of our mastery, accept we have much to learn, and ensure our people are well educated about resilience and our interconnection with the biosphere.

No panacea

Even if we adopted these 11 attributes as goals (even if we achieved them) there’s no guarantee that we will side step the looming shocks and changes currently facing our planet. However, a resilient world will be better placed come what may.

Which brings me to the end of this series of (relatively) ad hoc reflections on resilience thinking, what it is and why it’s worth knowing about. I’m not suggesting it will save the world; but I am certain it will provide new insights on the nature of the challenges facing us and why the complexity of the world makes these challenges so wicked. And, indeed, if we as a society are not prepared to acknowledge the complexity that lies at the heart of the challenge of sustainability, there is little hope of us meeting that challenge.

If you enjoyed this blog and would like to read any of my earlier pieces on resilience thinking, here’s a list of topics with links:

Why can’t we fix this? Because it’s complex
Introducing the notion that ‘complexity’ lies at the heart of our big challenges

Solving sustainability – It’s complicated AND complex. Do you know the difference?
‘Complexity 101’, complex is different to being complicated but most people mix them up

Thinking resilience – navigating a complex world
Ideas about resilience comes from many areas, most them are about working with complexity

The myth of the optimal state: adaptive cycles and the birth of resilience thinking
Buzz Holling and collapsing spruce forests. More control just made it worse

The perils of command and control and the pathology of Natural Resource Management
How the belief of mastery, blind application of efficiency and vested interests leads to a decline in a system’s resilience

On identity, complexity and a ‘little’ fossil fuel project off the West Australian coast
The identity of a system drives decision making above and beyond rationality

Death of the Queen, identity and a sustainable world
Thinking of ‘the Crown’ as a complex adaptive system (RIP Queen Elizabeth II)

Losing it – the consequences of stepping over the threshold
When a system crosses a threshold, it loses its identity

To be or not to be? It’s really a question about whether we adapt or transform
Adaptation and transformation, two important concepts in resilience thinking that most people use interchangeably without much thought

Resilience – the good, the bad and the ugly
Resilience thinking is almost always inspirational, but it’s also ambiguous and politicians love hiding behind it

Banner image: Maybe if Moses had shown a little more humility, the 10 Commandments might have been a tad more resilient. (Image by Jeff Jacobs from Pixabay)

Climate polarity – when it comes to carbon emissions it’s the super-rich versus the world

By David Salt

On the one hand we have Australia’s richest woman telling the privileged students of one of Australia’s most exclusive schools that global warming is not caused by humans.

On the other, we have the NGO Save the Children releasing an extensively researched (and independently reviewed) report pointing out global warming is caused by humans and the consequences of this are that children worldwide will suffer.

There is somewhat of a cosmic gulf between these two positions.

Unfortunately, when it comes to government action on climate change, it seems the beliefs of Australia’s richest woman are more important than the suffering of coming generations.

“Be very careful about information spread on an emotional basis or tied to money”

Australia’s richest woman, if you’re in any doubt, is the iron ore billionaire Gina Rhinehart; and she made her comments denying the link between human activity and climate change in an address to students at St Hilda’s in Perth, her old school.

In her speech she said humans do not cause global warming and warned against climate change ‘propaganda’. She said the girls should consider influences such as the sun’s orbit, volcanoes and “other scientific facts that I had the benefit of learning when I was at school.” (Note, these are standard red herrings put forward by the ‘Church of Climate Denial’.)

She believes people are being “overwhelmed by media and propaganda” regarding climate change and urged St Hilda’s students to “research for the facts.”

Gina Rhinehart is on old world climate denier with deep investments in the coal industry and a major supporter of the National Party, the political party that has effectively blocked national action on climate change in Australia for most of the last decade.

Her most breathtaking statement in her speech to her old, privileged school was: “Please be very careful about information spread on an emotional basis, or tied to money, or egos or power-seekers.” Breathtaking for its irony, lack of reflection and hypocrisy. And so sad for the truth it enfolds – that the money, egos and power-seeking of the super-rich trump the sustainable future of civil society itself; the ‘truth’ is that the power that the super-rich wield to protect their investments (against the interests of everyone else) is more potent than the democratic processes we established to steward the common good.

Over time, this blog, Sustainability Bites, has discussed the many reports that document the parlous state and degrading trends of our environment (think bleaching coral systems, burning forest biomes, extreme weather and collapsing biodiversity). We’ve also noted the growing chorus of appeals for action from government from all corners of society (think emergency workers, doctors, economists, academics and lawyers); all largely ignored by our national government.

All of this came to mind as I read Rhinehart’s message to her old school, and all of it I’m sure she would have simply discounted as emotional, biased and fear mongering being driven by people with vested interests.

What about the children?

About the same time as Rhinehart was delivering her world view on the state of the world, I saw a report from Save the Children painting a stark future for the children of the world. The report, titled Born into the climate crisis, reveals the devastating impact the climate crisis will have on children and their rights if nations do not work together to limit warming to 1.5C as a matter of the greatest urgency. Launched ahead of global climate talks in Glasgow, the report is based on new modelling led by researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

The report reveals that even if nations meet their Paris Agreement pledges, a child born in 2020 will experience on average: twice as many bushfires; almost three times as many crop failures; two and half times as many droughts; three times as many river floods; and seven times more heatwaves in their lifetime compared to what Baby Boomers have lived with (Rhinehart, I note, was born in 1954; right in the middle of the Baby Boomers).

In Australia, children born in 2020 can expect to experience four times as many heatwaves, three times as many droughts, as well as 1.5 times as many bushfires and river floods, under the current trajectory of global emissions.

This is not an isolated or ‘out there’ conclusion. It’s in keeping with predictions from a range of different sources attempting to understand and manage the consequences of climate change. The World Health Organization, as one other recent example, has just released a report confirming that climate change is the most pressing concern and threat to people’s health saying rising temperatures threaten to undo the past 50 years of improving global health!

It’s just not fair

According to the Oxfam, the world’s wealthiest 1% of people produce double the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50%. Thing about that.

The wealthiest 5% alone – the so-called “polluter elite” – contributed 37% of emissions growth between 1990 and 2015.

The world’s richest enjoy the fruits of economic growth. The world’s poorest, pay for it.

Oxfam makes a very strong connection between inequity and climate change. It says: “The fight against inequality and the fight for climate justice are the same fight.”

Further, it says governments everywhere need to end subsidies for fossil fuels (according to the IMF, the fossil fuel industry benefits from subsidies of $11m every minute!) and stop mining and burning coal. It’s fairly explicit about this: “Nowhere in the world should governments allow the construction of a single new coal-fired power station, the public health and climate costs of which are borne by the poorest and most marginalized communities worldwide.” Against this background it is to be noted that the Australian Government has just last week signed off on four new coal mines to proceed.

And, as Oxfam points out, climate impacts hit the poorest hardest. What’s more, climate change is pushing more people into poverty. The World Bank estimates that an additional 68 to 135 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change.

Is it any wonder the super wealthy would rather not reflect on the many inconvenient truths associated with climate change?

Let them eat cake

It’s reputed that in the 1789 during an awful famine in France, the plight of the peasants was brought to attention of the queen, Marie Antoinette. They are starving and have no bread, she was told; to which she replied: “Let them eat cake.”

The queen was not popular with the people, seen as profligate and out of touch. The massive inequities present in France at the time precipitated the French Revolution, which led to the annihilation of the royal family. Marie Antoinette lost her head on the guillotine in 1793. Maybe she should have shown a little more concern and empathy for the poor of her nation.

Gina Rhinehart is a member of our planet’s super elite. Her outrageous fortune is based on minerals extraction and fossil fuel. She rejects the science underpinning our understanding of anthropogenic climate change, encourages others to do the same, and shows little regard for the plight of a growing number of people on this planet (including coming generations).

She has the right to her own beliefs but when those beliefs shore up the recalcitrant National Party causing our nation to turn our back on an effective climate change response, people have the right to call her out.

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if she were to respond with “Let them eat cake.”

Banner image: Anthropogenic climate change is an inconvenient (and oft discounted) truth in the eyes of the super-rich. (Image by Tumisu from Pixabay)