This essentially sums up two of the sessions I attended on Monday morning at WCDM.
The keynote presentation of the conference was entitled “World on the Edge”, presented by Lester Brown. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute. It was refreshing to receive a free copy of his book as we arrived, rather than too often happens where the presentation is part of the marketing campaign.
Brown spoke with passion and a clear message – we need to practice Prevention – there will be no way to manage this disaster.
Brown is speaking about the impact on our civilisation of water and food shortages resulting from climate change. His institute’s purpose is to promote a renewable energy future – and provide a road map to get there.
Some interesting food for thought;
- Using grain for ethanol has effectively linked the price of grain to the price of Oil
- Filling the tank of a large SUV with ethanol consumes enough grain to feed a person for a year.
- “We are only one bad harvest away from chaos”
Brown offered a number of ways to change things, making these changes are technically possible, and if his numbers are to be believed, economically possible. The real challenge is get the political support to achieve these changes – we have to want to change.
Brown’s comments highlight the complexity and interconnectedness of the modern world. As he noted, we need to recruit and exploit the knowledge of multiple specialist disciplines to understand and act – and this message should resonate at all levels where we try to understand and change complex adaptive systems.
This leads nicely into the session by John Bircham, “Resiliency – The Seemingly Impossible Dream?”. Bircham is from New Zealand and I am always keen to read his new work and see what he is thinking.
Today he was going back to his ecological roots talking about the Adaptive Cycle and Holling. It is also from this session that appropriated the Hitchhiker’s Guide metaphor.
John was building on a presentation he made last year. In that session he asked “If resilience is the answer, what was the question?”.
The message today was that we can only understand these things in context. Like Brown’s his context was global and complex. Bircham introduced Holling’s model of Panarchy – natures alternative to hierarchy. The context of resilience therefore includes the unpredictability that comes with nature.
I have been meaning to write an entire post reviewing the work of John Bircham, talking to him yesterday reminded me about that. I shall get that done for next week.
I also attended a third session this morning, about the fusion of Operational Risk and BCM at Bank of Montreal. Thomas Frank and his colleague gave a good presentation about how they are achieving synergy across these disciplines. They also had some useful ideas for governance and reporting metrics. A lot of the detail is apparently going to be included in the CD rather than being in the delivered presentation.
Unfortunately this was an operational, process-oriented session, wedged between two sessions about grand design and profound thinking.
Your excellent blog brought to my attention, for the very first time, the Earth Policy Institute. What a great and much needed organisation. There may be argument from some quarters about Global Warming but there can be no argument about the world’s population problem. We need strong organisations that can raise their voice above the clamour of self-interest and political ideology. We also need people of high-prominence to put their energy into organisations as, sadly, many people do not follow causes only the famous and influential.