Feb 4, 2021
New TED Talk from The Response host Tom Llewellyn is out now: "Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disaster"
Watch it here: https://youtu.be/-SamQq9-wTg
I’ve been told that I never get tired of giving people bad news, so here we go.
The impacts of climate change are already being felt. This is no longer just a challenge that future generations are going to have to face. It’s ours now.
According to a recent report from the UN, in the past 20 years, there were over 7,000 major disaster events causing 1.2 million deaths, affecting more than 4 billion people, and resulting in almost three trillion dollars in global economic losses.
Strikingly, the number of climate-related disasters nearly doubled from the previous two decades.
Last year we hit the hottest global temperatures on record, saw the first Giga fire (burning over 1 million acres in Northern California), and even had a Zombie Storm in the Atlantic!
The questions now are:
- How bad is the climate going to get?
- How quickly can it get better?
- And what are we going to do in the meantime?
I don’t know about the first two questions, but I’ve seen a number of things that might just hold some answers to the last one.
That's just a short excerpt from the TED Talk.
Despite all this bad news, disasters can have a silver lining. Time after time, remarkable communities rise up after natural, social, or political disasters, revealing the core of our humanity and providing a glimpse at how we might respond in the face of even bigger challenges.
And after you watch the talk, please leave questions and share your stories of collective resilience in the comment section.
We’ll be back in a few weeks with a new episode.