“an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty”
Perhaps our descendants won’t condemn us for our apathy and inertia. After all, we will leave them the greatest man-made coral reefs the world has ever seen; streets where we used to live and breathe and dream. There is however hope, provided we don’t leave matters simply in the hands of the state and the markets. We will need to engage with engineers, architects, designers, writers, thinkers and, above all, citizens to anticipate and mitigate what may come. We can save our cities but only if we face the prospect that they may already be lost and work our way back from the end.
The loss of ecological resilience (Holling 1973, 1996) tests the adaptive capacity of the human dimensions of the system. Patterns of abrupt change (Gunderson 2003) are described, in a handful of heuristics, by (1) an adaptive cycle, (2) panarchy, (3) resilience, (4) adaptability, and (5) transformability. The first two describe the dynamics of systems within and across scales, whereas the last three are the properties of social-ecological systems that determine these dynamics. Each is described in the following sections, and together they provide the foundation for the subsequent propositions.