Climate solutions will come from those on the front lines of the crisis, not wealthy leaders
- As world leaders drag their heels over climate solutions and who should implement them, communities are seeking to address climate issues at a local level
- Funding grass-roots action strengthens local resilience and adaptability, while helping to break the government-corporation deadlock
As the late US Senator Everett Dirksen used to say, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money”.
In short, the consortium of state, business and international bodies remains stuck because everyone is waiting for the other to act.
This leaves the bottom half of society as simultaneously the victims of the climate crisis and the possible saviours, if they can mobilise themselves to deal with local issues and change the wider narrative. Logically speaking, if the masses make themselves resilient, they could compensate for the fragility of the concentrated few. But mass movements can only occur if there is a mindset change from the unsustainable status quo.
Despite the pessimistic outlook, my optimism tells me that localised human and natural disasters are forcing mindset change at the community level. All politics is ultimately local.
Black Swan author Nassim Taleb argues that conventional thinking ignores small events that have a huge impact. To him, the opposite of fragility is not resilience, which is too risk-adverse, but “anti-fragility”. Since you cannot predict future events, systems must be able to adapt to take more shocks and losses.
Indeed, a system’s ability to learn how to take losses makes it “anti-fragile”. Pushing for resilience is too timid, because minimising risks also minimises gains, which actually makes the system more fragile. Anti-fragility means having a system that learns by experimentation to do anything that may offer more upsides than downsides (including taking more risks).
The “anti-fragility” logic suggests that the real solution to the climate disaster is less about ideologies such as “democracy versus autocracy”, but more about diversity versus monoculture. Diversity allows experimentation on many fronts and inclusivity is about sharing for all, rather caring for the few.
Climate change affects the seven billion poorer people in the world more than the rich one billion. While the rich one billion controls most of the wealth, they will not be “resilient” if by 2037, the other eight billion remain poor and battered by climate disasters.
8 billion people must protect the Earth and close the development gap
Winter is already here. To survive the past is always a blessing. To not act in the face of coming disaster is our perennial curse.
Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective