COVID-19: the case for prosociality - The Lancet
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)01761-5/fulltext

The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic, published on Sept 15, lays bare what has been nothing less than a massive global failure—a failure of rationality, transparency, norms of public health practice, operational coordination, and international solidarity.
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The Commission gives recommendations in three main areas.
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Third, ambitious proposals to ignite a renaissance in multilateralism, integrating the global response to the risk of future pandemics with actions to address the climate crisis and reversals in sustainable development. In this way, the Commission boldly sets out a vision of a different future, defined by a properly financed and better-prepared global architecture that is driven by cooperation and shared responsibility rather than globalised profit-seeking.

nevim jestli tohle tema uz tu probehlo

An overlooked climate strategy: Denser cities - The Globe and Mail
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/article-an-overlooked-climate-strategy-denser-cities/

#architecture #climateFriendly

IKEA dokončuje obchod budoucnosti. Parkoviště u něj nenajdete, nehrozí už ani fronty - Aktuálně.cz
https://zpravy.aktualne.cz/finance/nakupovani/ikea-viden/r~15cb0494f44f11eb94d2ac1f6b220ee8/

Nový obchod IKEA je zcela bez aut - celý koncept se zaměřuje na pěší, cyklisty a cestující městské hromadné dopravy. Tím ušetří celkem 350 tisíc cest autem, a tudíž 1000 tun CO2, které připadají na obvyklou prodejnu," upřesňuje Mosserová.

Zákazníci si podle ní budou moct odvézt pouze takový sortiment, který sami unesou nebo jsou schopni přepravit metrem či na kole. Větší zboží pak bude možné objednat přes službu Klikni a vyzvedni s dopravou domů.

Budovu za spolupráce IKEA navrhlo architektonické studio Querkraft architekten. Na celkem čtyřech fasádách se nachází dohromady 160 stromů a keřů, které mají přispět k ochlazení mikroklimatu města. V horký den má podle společnosti instalovaná zeleň ochladit okolní čtvrť až o 1,5 stupně Celsia. O udržitelnost budovy se podle IKEA postarají také i fotovoltaické panely s výkonem 88 kWp a váhou 13 tun, které zaberou až 800 metrů čtverečních plochy střechy.

Governing In The Planetary Age
https://www.noemamag.com/governing-in-the-planetary-age/

If we’ve learned one lesson from the pandemic, it’s that nation-states don’t govern well at the planetary level or at the local level. The same is true for other planetary phenomena like climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions operate at a planetary level, but consequences vary dramatically from one locality to another. Neither the problem nor its impacts align with national boundaries.

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nation-states are also not the right institution for climate change adaptation: Los Angeles, Miami and Minneapolis are all impacted by climate change, but in vastly different ways that require vastly different policies. In fact, these cities’ climate impacts have more in common with cities in other nation-states (for example, Cape Town, Dhaka and Moscow, respectively) than they do with each other. Yet nation-states are wired for coordination and collaboration among the subnational entities contained within them, not across them.

This dynamic is found across a range of major issues. From economic precarity to public health, the nation-state is ill-equipped to manage the planetary roots of the problems and the local consequences for communities.

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Solving these twin crises of ineffective and illegitimate governance requires a fundamental restructuring of our governing institutions. In particular, it requires stripping the nation-state of many of its powers and governance functions, moving some up to planetary institutions and others down to local institutions.

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The “planetary” refers to issues, processes and conditions that span the Earth and transcend nation-states. “Global” and “globalization” are the currently popular terms for describing world-scale issues. But the planet is not the globe: The globe is a conceptual category that frames the Earth in human terms. Globalization, likewise, adopts a fundamentally human-centric understanding of the “integration” that has happened over the last few decades — the accelerating flow of people, goods, ideas, money and more.

The planet, by contrast, frames Earth without specific reference to humans. “To encounter the planet,” explains Dipesh Chakrabarty, “is to encounter something that is the condition of human existence and yet profoundly indifferent to that existence.” The Earth is not ours alone. Worldwide integration is not merely the intentional work of humans. Humans are embedded and codependent with microbes, the climate and technologically enabled emergent trans-species communities.

Planetary thinking emerges from ongoing transformations in the fields of ontology, or the nature of being, and epistemology

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Like Galileo and Darwin in earlier eras, the planetary represents a paradigm shift. It is neither empirically nor normatively adequate to assume, as the idea of globalization does, that humans top the global hierarchy and all else must and can bend to the march of human progress. We are but one (very recent) component in the biogeochemical ferment of the Earth, caught up in feedback loops of the carbon cycle and microbial and multispecies codependency.

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By planetary governance institutions, we do not mean the traditional institutions of global governance. The U.N., I.M.F. and World Health Organization, among other contemporary global governance institutions, are multilateral member-state institutions that focus on human-specific flows and represent the interests of their member states. They don’t respond directly to planetary challenges or answer directly to citizens.

The planetary demands new binding institutions at the planetary scale, not simply member state institutions that operate on a voluntarist basis. This does not mean a single world state. We envision a specifically delimited authority at the planetary level over specifically planetary things.

In practice, this means we need binding planetary institutions that go beyond the Paris accord for climate, beyond the W.H.O. for syndromic surveillance and health, beyond the U.N. Environmental Program to deal with biodiversity and a wholly new planetary institution to deal with tech-related risks. Together, these would form a new planetary tier of governance, above and beyond the nation-state.

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Together, nested and interlocking planetary, national and local institutions would form a system of multilevel governance. This system architecture allows for governance bodies to be better suited to the scale of the issue they are tasked with governing. Rather than default to the nation-state (and then wring our hands when the nation-state fails), as we do now, the principle of subsidiarity provides a rule of thumb for determining which governing institutions should be assigned to deal with which challenges.

Global Climate Action III:
The Power of Consciousness
https://medium.com/...stitute-blog/global-climate-action-iii-the-power-of-consciousness-a15b9422e57f



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Access to what the Wuppertal Institute’s Uwe Schneidewind calls “transformation literacy” is highly restricted, which is even more true for vertical literacy, as I have argued before. Both of these capacities happen to be in the blind spot of higher education today. Yet access to them is more critical than ever before. What could scale, and amplify vertical transformation literacy at a level of scale that is commensurate with the challenges we face? What might be a real game changer in addressing this blind spot of our learning and leadership systems today?

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Today, our main issue is no longer how to bring cutting-edge design into the construction of physical architecture, but how to bring state-of-the-art systems change methods to the evolution of new social architectures — social architectures that would be critical to accelerate the civilizational renewal and planetary healing called for today.

What if we reimagined a 21st century Bauhaus for transformation literacy? What if such a social Bauhaus would focus on the development and dissemination of vertical transformation literacy, that is, on methods and tools for awareness-based systems change? What if such a school, unlike the one a hundred years earlier, were available for not only the few, but in principal for each and everyone? What if all the prototypes for such a new school were already here? What if the methods and tools, the living examples, the inspired pioneers, the ecosystems of hubs, the innovation labs and all the new platforms for high-quality online-offline learning — what if all these strategic assets of a new Bauhaus school were already here?

What if the only thing we needed to do to activate this dormant school of transformation were the following three things: a set of intentional places that would host the inaugural regional hubs of this school; a small core group that would refine and clarify the conceptual cornerstones; and some seed funding that would allow for creating an infrastructure that is built for purpose — to support the civilizational renewal and planetary healing — and designed for replication at all levels of scale.

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At the Presencing Institute, an outgrowth of the MIT Learning and Leadership Centers, we have already been prototyping new whole-person, whole-systems learning environments for many years. These free and open-source-based, online-to-offline learning infrastructures have attracted more than 150,000 registered users over the past five years and have activated a global ecosystem of change makers for awareness-based systems change (see MITx u.lab, Societal Transformation Lab).

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The first two articles in this three-part series explored two blind spots in the response to global climate change: soil and democracy. The third one is consciousness.

January 2020, Northern Germany: Farmer’s Conference On Creating From Nothing
On the last day of the gathering, I was asked to sum up my take on our discussions over the previous two days. Here is what I shared:

1. First: Action Confidence. All profound change starts with a deep trust in our own capacities to rise to the occasion. My colleague Shobi Lawalata articulated this the other day when she said, reflecting on the larger challenges of her community and country: “This is the moment I was born for.” Thus, the first thing we need is the awareness and courage that makes us turn toward the problem, rather than away from it.

2. The Goal: Reach 100% Regenerative Agriculture by 2040. Anyone who reads the climate science with an open mind will reach the same conclusion: the goal is to be 100% regenerative by 2040, both in our farming and in our energy systems worldwide. Granted, given our institutional realities, it might take a few more years. Maybe it won’t happen until 2050. But the goal remains the same.

3. How: Direct Dialogic Democracy. How do we make progress toward this goal? By building new coalitions — Fridays For Future, Scientists For Future, Farmers For Future, etc. — and by making our democracy more dialogic, distributed, and direct. The problem today is not that we have too many options, but that we have too few. We have private choices as consumers, but we lack true public choices as citizens to debate and decide about the future we want to co-shape. What we need today is citizens’ assemblies, focusing on what will be essential in 2040. Then, after extensive public dialogue, the best ideas should be voted on in a citizens’ referendum. The resulting roadmap would be passed on to the legislative and executive bodies to refine and incorporate into the public policy framework, all in consultation with the relevant stakeholder groups. Much of this is already beginning to happen in a variety of places and communities around the world, including Ireland, France, England, Scotland, Spain, Canada, and Taiwan. But these are tiny beginnings. A lot more needs to happen now…

4. Transforming the Economy from Ego to Eco. Currently, our economies use an operating system based on egosystem awareness. Changing that operating system from ego to eco would transform it in almost every way imaginable, and transform one of the most important root issues of these problems. For example community-supported agriculture (CSA) connects farmers more closely and more intentionally with those who consume what they grow. Rather than getting paid for every apple or carrot, the farmer receives a fixed amount per week or per month from me (and from the other members of the CSA). In return, I receive a selection of fresh fruits and vegetables that are produced using the principles and practices of regenerative organic farming. The model changes how consumers relate to the farm, from transactional to transformative or intentional. This model exists in many places on a small scale today but going forward this model of solidarity-based agriculture could also be scaled to reshape the whole system. Thomas Jorberg, CEO of GLS Bank, a socially responsible bank in Germany, asked: “How can we take what’s working in the CSA model to the regional or the national level of solidarity-based farming? That is where the next wave of social and economic innovation will be coming from.” And that is exactly where we need new forms of direct, dialogue-based democratic decision-making.

5. Vertical Impact. My parents converted to regenerative organic farming some 60+ years ago. For decades, young people visited the farm to learn about regenerative farming practices. Today, many of them have taken these principles and practices to their own farms across Germany, Europe, and the world. You might call this the “horizontal impact.” But some of those farmers also describe a deeper level of impact. They describe a process of being seen for who they really are, of waking up to their deeper purpose or intention in life. The phrase that came to mind when listening to these descriptions is vertical impact or vertical efficacy (vertikale Wirksamkeit).
The vertical impact of regenerative organic farming in this context, even though it’s a subtle process, may well be its most important role in the long run. In society today, we lack places that help people wake up to their true aspirations, to their highest future potential, to what they really want to do with their lives going forward. Vertical impact farming connects people to the living beings that are the farm’s ecosystem: the soil, the plants, and the animals. This deep sensing and listening experience could serve as a gateway to the deeper territories of human development and with that to the deeper dimension of leadership and self-leadership. That subtle impact, allowing people to sense and listen deeply beyond the boundaries of their own bubble, and to wake up to their deeper intentions in life, may well be one of the most important functions that the “farmers for future” can deliver for the healing of people and the planet today.

Innovation happens in places. The same is true for civilizational renewal. Where are these places? Regenerative organic farms could serve as one type of place for societal renewal.

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Another upcoming movement building event in Berlin that has the potential to blend the deeper leverage points at issue here — soil, democracy, consciousness — is the Olympia 2020 event on June 12, 2020, that, co-inspired and supported by Fridays For Future Berlin and Scientists For Future, will bring together 70,000 or so citizens and change makers in the Berlin Olympia Stadium. Even though the place has some deeply dark page in its history, like so many places in Berlin, it might be quite an interesting venue to stage such a radically new type of event. The intention of the event, as I understood from the organizers, is to create a blend between a cultural festival and a citizens’ event that activates collective action around climate change, biodiversity, social justice, and the future of democracy. The intended results include three to four specific petitions that will be delivered to the German Bundestag. Personally, I hope that events like this and the ones mentioned earlier, will help to explore new formats of deep learning-based movement building to activate the awareness-based agency that is called for today.