You can read the article here.

2012 Seoul Nuclear Security Summit: A Policy Discussion from The Korea Society on Vimeo.

Three issues with far-reaching causes and consequences, climate change, water scarcity, and pandemics, are examined with attention to their national security implications and impacts on the global commons. The authors aim to trigger new ways of thinking about the complex challenges of these issues. Because their effects are mostly the result of individuals and states acting out of self-interest rather than harmful intent, these three issues are treated as “threats without threateners.”

With sources and solutions that cross national and regional boundaries, multiple parties working together are more effective than unilateral action. In all three areas, risks are hard to assess, in both severity and time frame; therefore, mustering political will and coalitions for action is inherently difficult.

The paper describes four overlapping clusters of policy approaches, international negotiations, coalitions of the willing, transcommunity networking, and anti-fragile approaches, and their relative successes and limitations. Considered one of the policy approaches with the greatest potential for tackling interconnected global challenges, anti-fragile systems do not just cope with change or uncertainty; they benefit from them. They search for alternatives that attract new participants, scale to accommodate those new participants, and create positive feedback loops that enable them not only to perform as well as or better than legacy systems but to continually improve over time.

Using suggestive examples to illustrate each type of approach, the paper builds a case for the evolution of policy away from fixing problems and toward new possibilities and combinations of methods to address threats that are both chronic and acute.

It’s an interesting read, with examples of policy successes and failures in dealing with all three issues, and an innovative look at “anti-fragility” (a concept of Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable).  You can read an executive summary here, or download the full research report here.

• The frequency of high-impact, low-probability (HILP) events in the last decade such as Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and the nuclear crisis and tsunami in Japan, signals the emergence of a new ‘normal’ – the beginning of a crisis trend.
• Governments and businesses remain insufficiently prepared to manage HILP crises and shoulder their economic, social and humanitarian consequences.
• The report sets out the economic costs of HILP events and how the impacts of a shock spread across sectors and countries in today’s globalized world.
• The report explores two critical dimensions of the decision-making environment during a crisis – omnipresent questions of scientific and technological uncertainty, and the competing economic and political interests of key stakeholders.
• Effective messaging and communications have never been more important in the management of high-impact events. The report draws on systemic analysis of social media to understand how the public discourse is shaped; highlights the window of opportunity to influence media messaging; and draws lessons for how the media should handle scientific uncertainties.

Reuters, the Financial Times and the Guardian all covered the report’s release.  You can also listen to one of the report’s main authors, Bernice Lee, outline its main findings in this audio file.  You can download the full report here, or an executive summary here.

Happy holidays, all.

I have been fortunate enough to be part of the judging panel for a design competition to try and change this – to try and make the invisible substance of groundwater more visible. Visualizing.org and HeadsUp teamed up to challenge design professionals to bring more attention to the sad state of our groundwater depletion.

All the judges were impressed with the caliber of entries. The winner, Richard Vijgen, was able to innovatively highlight seasonal trends of groundwater for the past decade AND long-term groundwater depletion trends around the world.

Thomson Reuters/Nasdaq has generously donated the billboard space in New York City’s Time Square to celebrate the next World Water Day on March 22, 2012. The display will run for one month. Be sure to watch for it! You can also watch it from afar via webcam starting on World Water Day.

A key challenge we had at the beginning of the contest was locating the right set of data to run the competition. Luckily, Leonard F. Konikow from the U.S. Geological Survey and Jay Famiglietti from the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling, using NASA’s GRACE satellite, had just the right set of information. It has been a very interesting process to connect world-renowned scientists in the water field with design/advertising professionals to get an easier-to-digest groundwater message out to the general public.

So, is any one up for the challenge to bring similar competitions to other major cities in the US and around the world? Or have even better ideas of how to get the message across? Peggy Weil was a one-person tour de force in making this competition happen.  We hope there are others like Peggy who are interested in bringing this to Amman, Beijing, Delhi, Dubai, Mexico City, Sydney, or other places where the groundwater depletion story needs to be told.