Written by Jim Cummings.
At a conference this summer, Building Climate Resilience for Equitable Communities, Shaun Donovan, Director of the Office of Management and the Budget, announced a slew of new White House climate resilience initiatives that are targeted to helping communities at risk and reduce the inequity that has become a major source of social instability. He asked:
“Why are some children less likely to go to college, find good-paying jobs, and stay out of the criminal justice system? Why do those who have the least stand to lose the most when the storm comes through?”
Donovan went on to outline several programs that address these questions, through the lens of federal efforts to increase resilience in the face of climate challenges, including
Tags: close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, justice, personal assets, resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
A new research paper has added resilience to the qualities that are enhanced in those who practice mindfulness—that is, maintaining a non-judgemental awareness of the present moment. The concept has roots in Buddhism and meditation, though simpler forms of “mindfulness training,” stripped of most of Buddhism’s conceptual framework, have spread widely in recent years, aiming to harness the benefits of in-the-moment awareness in the workplace and in daily life.
In the study, recently summarized in Pacific Standard, participants’ personal resilience was measured via ten self-descriptive statements, including “able to adapt to change,” “can stay focused under pressure,” and are “not easily discouraged by failure.” The researchers concluded:
Mindful people can better cope with difficult thoughts and emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.
Consider this yet another nudge in the direction we encouraged in the “Qualities of the Resilient Investor” section of our book: maintaining some sort of centering practice is, for many, a key foundation for cultivating personal resilience. From Chapter 6, Be Ready for Anything:
Over the course of a life, some combination of counseling, spiritual practice, participation in men’s or women’s groups, membership in a church community, professional development programs that include an emotional/reflective element, and extended immersions in the natural world with like-minded friends will serve to deepen your self-awareness and help clarify all the choices that present themselves to you.
Tags: evolutionary strategy, personal assets, resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
In recent weeks, we’ve featured the work of several networks of cities and of mayors that are working together to tackle climate challenges locally. But if you live in a smaller city (or aren’t a mayor), you may be interested in a couple of other organizations we just came across. Resilient Communities for America includes over 200 city and county councilmembers (and mayors) and offers free resources to help your community track emissions, plan for solar and resiliency, and more. The larger ICLEI (launched in 1991 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives; now rebranded as Local Governments for Sustainability) has hundreds of members in 42 states, and over a thousand from around the world; dues for cities under 50,000 are just $600/year. Either or both of these networks could really help you jump-start local initiatives or take the next steps.
Tags: close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, personal assets, resilience, tangible assets
Written by Jim Cummings.
Restoring wetlands, protecting working forests and farmland, and enhancing wildlife habitats are some of the most exciting avenues for resilient investing. Such efforts provide tangible returns in the form of regional resiliency, and increasingly, they are being packaged into traditional investment vehicles that offer reliable financial returns as well. Earlier this year, senior executives from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse, and others gathered to discuss what they see as a burgeoning market for conservation finance. “The mantra of this event is, ‘scalability, repeatability, investability’” said John Tobin, managing director and global head of sustainability at Credit Suisse. And the numbers being bandied about are certainly exciting for those of us who’ve been touting the trailblazing—but modest—grassroots efforts of various regional organizations that have, until recently, been the primary movers and shakers in this realm. Consider: while conservation efforts by governments and foundations have been funded to the tune of about $50 billion/year,
Tags: farming, financial assets, impact investing, regenerative, sustainable global economy strategy
Written by Jim Cummings.
With resiliency continuing to gain momentum as a framework for personal, community, and national planning, it’s not surprising to hear that a new building standard has been proposed that will encourage architects to design projects in ways that can “better withstand shocks such as super storms, sea-level rise, drought, heat waves or even longer-simmering social unrest.”
“Resiliency is the next step in the entire green ecological design framework,” says Doug Pierce, who developed the RELi Green + Resilient Property Underwriting Standard, a collaboration between Capital Markets Partnership and the design firm Perkins and Wills. GreenBiz.com offers a good summary of the program,
Tags: resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
This summer, the Obama administration launched a new AmeriCorps program that dovetails perfectly with the local resiliency efforts that we’ve highlighted as part of the Close to Home resilient investing strategy. Resilience AmeriCorps was formed “to assist vulnerable communities that lack the capacity to address climate-resilience planning and implementation. The AmeriCorps VISTA members will increase civic engagement and community resilience in low-income areas, and help those communities develop plans for becoming more resilient to any number of shocks and stresses, including better preparations for extreme weather events.” Or, as funding partner The Rockefeller Foundation put it: to “support the development of resilience strategies to help communities better manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable.” Now that’s a punchy definition of resilience!
The focus on vulnerable lower income communities is especially encouraging, since many current grassroots efforts tend to involve generally better-off and already socially-engaged activists. A White House overview of Resilience AmeriCorps stressed the importance of its social-justice priorities:
Tags: climate, close to home strategy, community groups, future, justice, resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
The UK newspaper The Guardian has been a leading voice on climate change for some time now. As part of its Keep it in the Ground campaign, they ran a series of excerpts from Naomi Klein’s most recent book, This Changes Everything. This one popped up again recently in one of our social feeds, and it’s a solid reminder of the stakes, and the potential, that stand before us. Here’s the rallying cry:
Slavery wasn’t a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn’t a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn’t a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn’t a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.
Klein goes on:
Tags: activism, climate, collaboration, community groups, evolutionary strategy, personal assets
Written by Jim Cummings.
Everywhere I turn lately, there’s another reminder that cities are central to our hopes for a more sustainable, resilient future. The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group—a decade-old collaboration among 75 of the world’s largest cities that are home to over a half-billion people and a quarter of the global economy—is on the forefront of these efforts, as is the Compact of Mayors, involving 84 cities, many of them smaller or mid-sized. Both groups are gearing up to have a major presence at the upcoming Paris climate talks. The C40 has just released a new report, Powering Climate Action: Cities as Global Changemakers, which highlights the collaborative potential of cities working together: “The evidence shows that cities are taking action even where they have limited power, by collaborating with other cities and non-state actors and catalysing wider climate action in the private sector and civil society.”
NRDC’s OnEarth magazine recently produced an issue devoted to city-based climate action that is full of inspiring stories, including
Tags: climate, close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, personal assets, sustainable global economy strategy
Written by Jim Cummings.
Resilient investors always keep their eyes on the horizon, so they’ll be ready to respond to whatever’s coming their way. A few things out there in the haze have caught our attention in recent weeks, and we thought we’d pass them along. One deals with a longtime holy grail, fusion energy, another is an out-of-the-blue development in brain science (wiring brains together seems to actually increase performance!?!), and the last highlights a much-hyped company that just pivoted on a dime in a new direction, exemplifying the power of a nimble resiliency when Plan A comes up short. All three represent potential game-changing breakthroughs, fascinating in their own right and worth having on your long-term resilient investment radar.
Tags: evolutionary strategy
Written by Jim Cummings.
Homesteads designed to increase self-suffiency are not just a throwback to the 60’s or a prepper fortification against total breakdown. In today’s uncertain world, they are investments in personal and local resiliency that offer substantial returns in any future scenario. And it doesn’t take much land to shift your family’s balance from total dependence on unsustainable (and potentially fragile) global food and energy systems, toward a much more rewarding and reliable balance of local, regional, and global supplies. After a few years, you may even find yourself feeling a lot less nervous about the “what if” consequences of a major economic or environmental crisis that could disrupt your access to distant goods.
But where to start? And why would you want to? We recently came across a great introduction to these questions, in a profile of Melliodora, a 2-acre homestead in a rural village setting; click through for more details.
Tags: close to home strategy, food, resilience, tangible assets, your home
Written by Jim Cummings.
The one-two punches of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy have spurred cities throughout the northeastern United States to invest in more reliable backup power systems. These “Resilient Power” initiatives reduce reliance on generators (which too often fail when fired up) in favor of more resilient solar, fuels cells, and power storage systems that can provide benefits between outages as well. A new Resilient Power Guide from the Clean Energy Group highlights early state-wide projects from Maryland to Vermont, which have spurred 40 municipal programs. The first target is emergency response facilities: “More than 90 critical facilities in the Northeast – including emergency shelters, wastewater treatment plants, firehouses and other first responder facilities – will have resilient electrical systems in place to improve emergency response in the next year, and to protect neighborhoods in the next power outage.” Click through to learn more about these trailblazing programs, then dig in a bit in your area to see how you might engage in some Zone 4 resilient investing to advance these efforts in your community.
Tags: climate, close to home strategy, collaboration, community groups, renewable energy, resilience
Written by Jim Cummings.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program is providing funding to cities from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Amman, Jordan. A City Resiliency Framework, including twelve “drivers” in four major areas (see illustration) helps each city focus on its particular chronic resiliency challenges, and to set the stage for a nimble response if an acute shock occurs. As examples: El Paso/Juarez is targeting water supplies as the southwestern drought deepens, while a 2013 mapping project in Kathmandu was reactivated after the recent earthquake to help guide recovery efforts. From a resilient investing perspective, this effort is centered in Zone 4 (involving a wide range of community organizations as well as municipal agencies and government, which is funded to hire a CRO, or Chief Resilience Officer) and Zone 1 (nonprofit and volunteer efforts) and Zone 6 (habitat, landscape). So far, two-thirds of the cities have been chosen, with the rest set to be announced later this year.
In looking over their blog, we were especially taken by the post on the mapping project, which jumped from the Kathmandu story to an Indonesian project that worked with an artists collective to map the city of Semarang:
Tags: community groups, local, resilience