CLIMATE DISRUPTION CHALLENGES:
Objectives of the Three Workshops
Systems Alignment in Response to Climate Disruption Challenges
So much news about climate disruption challenges is negative and numbing.
For our speaker series, we begin the 1st workshop on Wednesday evening, highlighting innovative responses by early adopters from the Bay Area.
On Friday morning, the 2nd workshop will include carbon positive aspects of the design, adoption, and implementation of climate-beneficial infrastructure.
Our final workshop on Friday afternoon will focus on an even more critical component - how to frame and message the issues -- so that people can embrace the challenges, adopt new behaviors and/or change expectations.
1st Workshop - Wednesday Evening: “The Early Adopters" in the Bay Area
Wednesday evening features individuals and organizations, including Invoking The Pause grant partners, whose work on various climate responses is underway, collaborative, and systemic. Many of these projects focus on and are linked to, regenerative agriculture, resiliency, and in particular, re-invention of the food production and distribution networks. These collaborative efforts underscore the need for cross-disciplinary approaches to addressing climate challenges.
2nd Workshop - Friday Morning: Design and Implementation of Climate Beneficial Practices for the Common Good
Friday morning session will discuss entering implementation phases. Both panels will be moderated and substantial time will be allowed to encourage questions from the audience.
The first panel will discuss carbon positive design which will be incorporated in the next 2-20 years, span both urban and rural settings, and are scalable, replicable and fractional. This model of "fractional response" is a key insight of the Project Drawdown approach –to take action on climate-related challenges is necessarily a multi-media effort: many disciplines must contribute partial responses to the complexity of the challenges so that taken together, we can make serious progress in reducing and drawing down atmospheric carbon concentrations.
Generally, the responses featured here are not in the category of geoengineering solutions; they emerge from and are sympathetic to, the design and success of living/biological systems.
The second panel will consider policy imperatives, financial models and emergent pathways for merging science-based models with patient capital and other methods of providing funding vital for successful implementation of essential infrastructure. California Healthy Soils Initiative, slow money, the Divest/Invest movement, and philanthropic investing will be considered.
3rd Workshop - Friday Afternoon: Vision, Messaging, and Establishing a Cohesive Narrative
Vision: Friday afternoon will focus on understanding "systems thinking" and highlight human perspective and intention in our relationship to the environment.
We will reframe and develop a wider understanding that all human systems necessarily rely on a superstructure of seamless and interconnected ecological function. Although it appears simple and self-evident, to many people it is anything but obvious. This aggregated recognition of systems thinking represents a like-mindedness needed to take collective action.
Human systems are nested within global ecological systems. We are embedded. This is the message as well as the vision: we are all included within larger established thriving living systems. As we encourage systems thinking, we can gain an understanding not only of the environment as a whole but in particular of the carbon cycle, as well as our interrelationship with it. Systems Health is Everything!
Messaging and Motivation: Human motivation is essential to taking action, as there are many roadblocks to the effective implementation of integrated systemic thinking. Understanding the neural system and the brain, and how that living system affects our sense of reasoning is critical. Our goal is to weave together concepts of environmentalism, systems thinking, and human responses -- both pragmatic and emotional --to the challenges of intentional management of carbon and materials and then minimizing our ecological footprint. In addition, the details of imprinting our desires on the information that we are continually processing must be addressed, now that we can form our own biases and can find corroborating information for virtually any worldview.
Narrative: Finally, this Session will pull together multiple elements of the climate challenges movement based on the premises of the first two sessions: widespread adoption of carbon-positive designs and practices that are beneficial not only to existing human systems but also to the general environment -- the land, the sea, and the atmosphere.