Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For 6,000 years, human societies have sought to control water through ever-larger infrastructure. As climate change brings more extreme floods, droughts and heatwaves, a growing number of cities are exploring a different path: adapting to water’s rhythms rather than trying to dominate them.
As Japan coins a new term for “cruelly hot days,” its linguistic and institutional adaptation to extreme heat starkly contrasts with growing climate denial among U.S. political elites, revealing an emerging global split between fossil-fuel holdouts and nations pushing for a rapid energy transition.
In flood-prone northern Bihar, women transformed savings groups and kitchen gardens into a thriving local market that boosts incomes, strengthens food security and helps communities adapt to increasingly unpredictable climate.
Rising energy and fertiliser prices linked to the conflict in the Middle East are increasing the risk of global food insecurity, prompting renewed questions about how to strengthen food security and reduce dependence on fragile global supply chains.
Plastic waste is no longer just a pollution issue. In many cities, it is now shaping how drainage systems function, with growing efforts to intercept debris upstream before it overwhelms flood infrastructure.
New research finds that healthy forests act as natural infrastructure that can significantly reduce the frequency and severity of floods, both small and large.
In the Pacific Islands, the annual spawning of palolo sea worms feeds communities, marks time and sustains cultural traditions. Why this Indigenous tradition is becoming increasingly important as climate change intensifies weather events.
Climate change deniers strangely think we should adapt to climate change (which they say isn’t happening). But adaptation is turning out to be much more problematic than previously imagined.
A temperature higher on average across the globe than any previously recorded since instrument readings began in the 1850s was measured on July 3. That record was broken again on July 4, and then again on July 5. We designed our infrastructure and agricultural practices for a pre-climate change Earth. We are unprepared for what is coming.
The polarization of adaptation and mitigation might also have created blind spots that made it harder to push for planet-cooling policies.
Adaptation to climate change alone is already a failed strategy.
Because the so-called ‘emergency’ isn’t going to solve it for us. Moreover, it isn’t going to get ‘solved’ as such at all. The start of the new beginning we need, is to admit that we have failed. And then seek, everywhere, and together, a real way forward.
