http://www.stockholmresilience.org/
Urban Bricolage anniekoh: The temporary public art work Loaded Text has made me more obsessed with ways of making planning public. The artists Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler “hand wrote the entire 65-page text of the Downtown Durham Revitalization Plan on a 150-foot stretch of damaged sidewalk” (source) Description from the Museum of Durham History on a retrospective of the work created in June 1989 by artists Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler in downtown Durham: The work was one of two temporary public art projects commissioned by the Durham Arts Council to coincide with Public Art Dialogue Southeast, a conference on public art.
Frances Westley, PhD Frances Westley joined the University of Waterloo as the JW McConnell Chair in Social Innovation in July 2007. In this capacity she is one of the principle leads in a Canada wide initiative in social innovation, SiG (Social Innovation Generation), a cross sectoral partnership to build capacity for social innovation in Canada funded by the J.W McConnell Family Foundation, University of Waterloo and the Ontario government. At University of Waterloo she leads a research team dedicated to understanding social innovation, and has designed both graduate and undergraduate curricula in social innovation. Dr. Westley is a renowned scholar and consultant in the areas of social innovation, strategies for sustainable development, strategic change, visionary leadership and inter-organizational collaboration. Her most recent book, Getting to Maybe (Random House, 2006) focuses the dynamics of social innovation, and institutional entrepreneurship in complex adaptive systems.
Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each.
Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) — DIVERSITAS The Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted the Nagoya Protocol at its tenth meeting on 29 October 2010 in Nagoya, Japan. The Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization of the Convention on Biological Diversity (in short, Access and Benefit-sharing-ABS) aims at regulating the access to genetic resources and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits derived from their utilisation. The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources is one of the three objectives of the CBD. More on the Nagoya Protocol. Nagoya Protocol text.
Resilience Alliance - Resilience Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different set of processes. A resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in social systems has the added capacity of humans to anticipate and plan for the future. National Disaster Resilience Competition The State of Washington has been invited to participate in the Phase 2 of HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC). The competition promotes risk assessment, stakeholder engagement, and planning. Awards will fund the implementation of innovative resilience projects to better prepare communities for storms and other extreme events. The NDRC Notice of Federal Award provides specific information on eligibility requirements.
Science On a Sphere SOS Explorer™ uses the NOAA-developed Terraviz™ visualization engine to create an interactive Earth for a flat screen display including those projected on walls, computers, and large displays, providing teachers, students, and the public access to a library of selected Science On a Sphere® datasets and movies. The visualizations show information provided by satellites, ground observations and computer models and rapidly animate through real-time global data. In addition, tools included in the application allow users to zoom into, probe, and graph the data, as well as add supplementary material including websites, videos, pictures, and placemarks. In order to make the product more accessible for teachers, lesson plans and pre-programmed tours through standards-relevant topics are provided. Watch a video to learn more about NOAA's SOS Explorer.
Resilient Cities - ICLEI: Home 15 April 2014 Together with eight international organizations ICLEI joined a new urban resilience partnership which was announced at the World Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia last week. “There has been a tremendous outpouring of support for urban resilience in recent years. This new collaboration represents a consolidation of those efforts as we prepare for an explosion of urbanization in the 21st century” said Margareta Wahlström, UNISDR Chief and Co-patron of the Resilient Cities congress 2012 and 2013. The partnership has been established by UN-Habitat, UNISDR, The World Bank Group, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR); the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); the Rockefeller Foundation; the 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge Programme, pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation; the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group; and ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability.
Community resilience and adaptation Resilient communities are capable of bouncing back from adverse situations. They can do this by actively influencing and preparing for economic, social and environmental change. When times are bad they can call upon the myriad of resouces that make them a healthy community. A high level of social capital means that they have access to good information and communication networks in times of difficulty, and can call upon a wide range of resources. The papers and reports linked to here recognise resilience as being people-centered, and highlight the importance of thinking about the social actors involved and their agency - social dynamics, power and politics.
Ecosystem Services - TEEB This tables presents the different categories of ecosytem services that ecosystems provide. Provisioning Services are ecosystem services that describe the material or energy outputs from ecosystems. They include food, water and other resources. Food: Ecosystems provide the conditions for growing food. Metadesigners Open Network An early prototype of The Lovers' Clock artwork See this set of notes on finding a more synergistic form of temporality Building Resilience in a Changing Climate: CCSOS Climate shocks are on the way. We’ve already spewed so much carbon into the atmosphere that a cascade of worsening crop failures, droughts, floods, and freak storms is virtually guaranteed. You, your family, and your community will feel the effects.