How Resilient is Cambridge wrapped up yesterday. (Actually, three weeks ago. It was a lot, I've been recovering from it.)

We wrote a report summarising all our findings. It came out pretty well and I encourage you to check it out, but I'll summarise the take aways here.

https://www.resilienceweb.org.uk/news/HRC_report_launch

#resilience #CommunityPower #SystemsThinking #community #ClimateCrisis
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Community Report: How Resilient is Cambridge | Resilience Web

Through our six evenings looking at food, reuse, flooding, energy, communications and community, we heard experts speak on the topics, had city councillors respond, and reserved an hour on each topic for general q&a. We identified many issues that are currently problems and that are likely to get worse with the climate crisis and geopolitical instability. Here are nine themes that were identified in multiple topics.
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1. We must plan now for the future

Waiting is going to make all our problems worse. Our energy and flooding infrastructure is old and in need of upgrading. The risk of flooding increases with climate change and continued urban growth. Our food systems operate on ‘just in time’ fulfillment chains that provide no buffer to external shocks. Delaying work to improve these systems increases risk.
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Further, critical work to make connections, map skills, and build meaningful trust in communities does not happen quickly and must be done in advance.
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2. Take an honest look at what is currently happening

Understanding the impact of policy means listening to those who are the most affected, not who has the most power. Some of the issues facing Cambridge are things that are difficult to assign responsibility to, including the ongoing crisis of inequality.
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Taking an honest look also includes tackling issues that fall through the cracks of existing governmental silos, which often get ignored because no one is responsible for them. Finally, it means finding ways to address major problems that will take significant amounts of investment, like the Denver Sluice - to see the future risks it poses, not just relying on the luck of near misses in the past.
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3. Cascading interconnections

A systems approach is required to understand the very interconnected problems we face. Often referred to internationally as the polycrisis, we have heard about the cascading impacts of flooding on energy, transportation, communications, and the reliance of all of our communication systems and sewage pump systems on the power staying on. Further, all the issues are amplified by inequality and will affect the most vulnerable first.
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4. Government silos are inflexible, with action too conservative or too restrictive

Resilience action can easily fall between government silos. Food is not considered to be critical infrastructure. Agriculture and Planning do not intersect, so planning for food policy (e.g. adding storage and buffers) has no clear home or owner despite being needed. Even if responsibility is clear, inadequate maintenance of infrastructure (flooding, energy, …) is itself an issue.
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In the areas of reducing waste and moving towards a circular economy there has been good policy support, which should be continued and extended further. Legislation and rules around liability concerns are needed to protect people and businesses, but can also prevent them from doing the right thing, especially in a disaster situation. A lot of usable items that go into the tip are prevented from being refurbished and reused because of liability concerns.
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5. Privatisation does not mean responsibility

If private interests can't make a profit, they only take as much care and responsibility as much as they are legally required to. On important issues like whether there should be battery backups in cell stations, neither the cell provider nor the power company have claimed responsibility. Without regulation this will continue to remain an issue; it is too important to leave to private interests.
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6. Erosion of trust

Polls show that although people like the idea of democracy, 50% of people feel that elected representatives don’t care about them. We also identified a loss of trust in industry, for which the incentives are to make a profit - not to provide a reliable or robust service. In telecommunications for example, priorities have shifted away from dependability towards centralised digital platforms, attention extraction, and privately owned infrastructure.
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Just-in-time food delivery systems are fragile to disruption in the supply chain. Water monopolies pollute water ways. Modern manufactured items are made to be cheaply replaced, are too expensive or difficult to repair, or are intentionally unrepairable and designed to break (i.e. planned obsolescence). And so trust erodes.
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7. Inequality exacerbates all other problems

Individual responsibility for action is inadequate and unjust; we saw this clearly for food, energy, communication, and flooding. In a disaster, vulnerable people will be the most affected because they likely have the least time and resources to be able to contribute to a response.
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Many people face barriers towards participating in civic life due to child care or other caring responsibilities, requiring accommodations for disabilities, employment responsibilities, or just feeling like they don’t have anything to add. There is a lack of spaces for people to meet and gather without spending money. There is a high level of insecurity among small scale local actors in the system (small farmers) who have trouble competing with industrialised farms.
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8. Flaws in system design

Most of our systems are not designed for resilience. There are choke points in the food and energy supply chains. Communications and flood response relies on single points of failure and becomes easily overwhelmed.
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Valuable resources treated as waste through mismanagement or poorly placed incentives, while new materials are mined under terrible conditions. Flood water that should slowly reabsorb into the ground instead runs into the drains.
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9. Lack of knowledge

Many people have lost or never gained the skills needed to perform some of the tasks that support resilience.  For example, schools are not teaching cooking or repair skills; we are reliant on smartphones to navigate, communicate and more.
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Those are the highlights! There's a ton more detail in the report:

https://www.resilienceweb.org.uk/news/HRC_report_launch
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Community Report: How Resilient is Cambridge | Resilience Web

Link to the next thread on solutions:
https://mastodon.art/@helencook/116772669075529183
Helen (@[email protected])

In addition to identifying the issues, How Resilient is Cambridge also identified a dozen strategies that will lead us to solutions. https://www.resilienceweb.org.uk/news/HRC_report_launch #resilience #CommunityPower #SystemsThinking #community #ClimateCrisis [1/16]

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