Syrians, polar bears and a changing climate
Was the extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009, the worst the country faced in modern times? Fact. Was its severity exacerbated by climate change? Almost certainly. Was the drought a contributing factor to the violent uprising in Syria which began in 2011 and propelled the large-scale migration of Syrians that caused a domino effect in the Middle East region and Europe? Very likely.
When the interconnectedness of climate change is “unpacked,” it becomes evident there is a lot more at stake than what is obvious to the plain eye. It is not about polar bears or a few more droughts and floods here and there. It is about systems reaching critical tipping points and often failing. In this example, failure to adapt to climate-related events caused food shortages and water supply crises and subsequently increased the risk for other events such as famine, riots, conflict, and migration and even the rise of the far right in Europe and elsewhere.
Let’s take another example. One of the most well-known cases of a climate-related domino effect was the 2011 floods in Thailand which caused a number of computer hard disk (HD) drive manufacturers to shut down. Aside from businesses like Western Digital and other HD manufacturers who were directly impacted by flooding, the domino effects of this incident resulted in a global shortage of HD drives impacting the sector’s customers (the computer manufacturer Hewlett Packard lost approximately US$2 billion) and employees (NEC slashed 10,000 jobs worldwide amid performance fears of its platform business that was hit due to flooding), all the way down to consumer and business level (adding $5–10 to the cost of each hard drive and ultimately computers). As business becomes more globalized, interconnected, and interdependent, both vertically (throughout the value chain) and horizontally (across sectors), these problems become a lot more complex and difficult to understand.
When dealing with one-off events, like a drought or a flood, if you are well prepared you can build resilience through (albeit expensive) business continuity planning. But what happens when you are faced with gradual, large-scale yet unpredictable shifts as earth systems reach tipping points?
A tipping point is a point at which nothing is the same again and one of the problems with tipping points is that we may not know when they are reached.
There is an anecdote about boiling a frog which is useful in explaining our collective fundamental difficulty in reacting to significant changes that occur gradually. As the explanation goes, when a frog is placed in a pot of boiling water, it quickly jumps out of harm’s way. However, when the frog is placed in a pot of water at room temperature and the temperature is slowly turned up over time, the frog adjusts its body temperature. By the time the water temperature becomes deadly, it is too late for the frog to escape. Jumping into boiling water can be compared with experiencing extreme weather events — generally easy to detect and relatively easy to enhance resilience. On the other hand, the impact of gradual changes in temperature is not necessarily easy to identify, and it is important to think about how long-term climate change might affect us before getting too comfortable in the cooler water and becoming less attuned to the changes taking place gradually.
One way to look at such changes is to use systems thinking. Systems thinking calls for a deeper understanding of risks, their relationship and boundaries within a system, how they influence one another over time, and what patterns emerge and manifest within a value-generating system. It encourages one to “push back” from events and points in time to see the pattern of which they are apart. The assumption is that one will be capable of dealing with a dynamic, rather than only a static, view of reality and thus manage the situation better. A system thinking model that is helpful for understanding complex issues is the iceberg model. We know that an iceberg has only 10–15% of its mass above the water while the rest is underwater. But that unseen bigger part is what the ocean currents act on, and what creates the iceberg’s observed movement at its tip. Climate change issues can be viewed in this same way. It is like looking at events that are moved by undercurrents of which climate change is a big part of.
The tip of the iceberg represents the various events we see every day in the news. As we look closer we notice that these events are forming patterns. Diving deeper below the patterns, we might even notice structural and systemic causes that give rise to these patterns over time. Eventually, we realise that the whole thing is sitting on a mental model (our own) that we use to create the reality that what we see (and don’t see) around us. Anaïs Nin expressed this deepest stratum of the iceberg model more poetically.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” Anaïs Nin
Put simply, a mental model is a sensemaking instrument by which to look at the world. Now if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Complex problems are not only difficult to grasp but are usually beyond a single organisation’s capacity to influence or control. Systems thinking, combined with approaches like scenario planning, offers a means to notice mental models, explore possibilities and attempt to strengthen resilience and reduce climate impacts as needed across a system. Traditional scenario planning recognizes that many factors may combine in complex ways to create future scenario stories that are both plausible and surprising. Scenarios that take into account climate change and explore how it might interact with other risk drivers such as social, technological, political, economic, and regulatory factors can be useful and help shape the future.
Taking this a step further, Reos Partners’ Transformative Scenario Process (TSP) aims to “get the whole system in the room” in order to understand the issues in hand, engage with them, and see how and where these issues are relevant, not only for one organization but the whole system. Rather than seeing strategic planning as the preserve of the “numbers people,” collaborative tools for strategy building, such as TSP, become essential to bring together all affected within the system and engage them in the exploration of the nature of the situation and its implications. The key is to bring together different functional disciplines, stakeholders, and generations in a collaborative process to interpret the issues through multiple lenses and to obtain the deepest insights and uncover solutions to which all players can commit. Whilst TSP and other methods such as social labs offer practical approaches to working with complex challenges it is important to remember that there is no quick fix and failure sometimes is more likely than not.
Systemic change requires and takes time, courage, energy, resources, and skill. It also demands from us a certain leap of faith. But with these ingredients in place, we have a good chance of projects and initiatives taking lives of their own, spawning resilient networks, creating alliances, and new ecologies. And when that happens, the relationships, strategies, actions and initiatives that emerge are of the scale and impact that is so desperately needed for addressing the existential challenge of our time, climate change.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
