Everywhere we look, at the moment, we see the word resilience. Yes, it just might have something to do with the event we’re launching this week – Nature First & Resilient Cities on 24 November.
But it’s also clearly front and centre for a growing number of people whose jobs it is to think about our future.
For instance, the keynote speaker Parag Khanna at the conference we attended in Singapore early this month. Khanna’s point is that climate change is complex and spawns winners and losers. While 50 countries are in decline around the world, follow the movement of young people to see where the brightest futures will be.
And it’s not just direct climate impact that’s the concern; it’s the geopolitical tensions, the cost of living crises, low productivity and general malaise that many people sheet home to the impending loss of our climate and nature security.
The Feds seem to be getting the picture, focusing on resilience way more than they focused on immigration (maybe fear of immigration is another factor rooted in climate threats).
Amid the 450 or so pages in the federal budget papers and speech, resilience appeared 171 times; immigration, by contrast, appeared just twice, according to Mandala Partners.
The economic research firm also worked with insurers Zurich and polling analysts Redbridge to create a new Australian Resilience Index.
It’s based on 2 million “public and proprietary data points to measure the resilience of Australians across health, financial, social and environmental indicators to a local community level”.
Adam Siddique, head of strategy at Zurich, said “We are in a ‘risk on’ environment – from economic uncertainty to more frequent and severe extreme weather events”.
But while we know that climate disasters and extreme heat will create massive burdens, what this research and many other analysts and strategic advisers clearly say is that it’s how well we recover that is even more significant.
The work that underpins the index found, unsurprisingly, that the biggest indicator of resilience is financial strength.
In a social media post, partner at Mandala Adam Triggs said that among the most resilient locations are Cottesloe in Western Australia, which is ranked as the most resilient area in the country, and that half of the least resilient areas were in the Northern Territory.
“Across Australia, 29 per cent of women fall into the low or very low resilience bands, compared with 9 per cent of men. Women are healthier on average than men. Even so, middle-aged women have the highest rates of low resilience, because they tend to have lower savings and superannuation balances and do more caregiving.”
Phew… we have a big job ahead of us.
At our event we’ve gathered some of the most brilliant people around, from corporate advisory to geographic and sectoral analysts studying the impact of climate change and strategic defence thinkers to understand the challenges in store.
They are not doomsayers.
They are the cool headed analysts, advisers and innovators who look not three months ahead to the next reporting season but to the next 10 or 20 year horizon that might have a hope of securing our future.
Check out our lineup. It’s just brilliant.
